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Vampirism 101 Yes, becoming a vampire. That's right: an untreated bite in Vvardenfell will do more than give you a few days painful swelling and itching, like the fallout from that brief fling you had with the coffee shop waitress last year. Although you can't become a werewolf, as you could in Daggerfall, you can fall prey to the spiritual malady of vampirism. The actual likelihood of encountering vampires is relatively small, unless you're actually looking for them; which is, of course, what Daggerfall veterans will do. This feature is clearly a nod to them, but Bethesda Softworks' dev team has done themselves proud with the results. When vampirism takes hold, several of your attributes (like Strength and Speed) rise drastically, and some of your skills (like Sneak, Hand-to-Hand, and the spell school Destruction) increase even more spectacularly. You gain an insanely high resistance to normal weapons, and a vampire touch spell that drains an opponent's health into yourself. This makes you capable of killing just about anything the gameworld can throw at you individually. You'll find a few groups of new quests awaiting your newbie throatmuncher, as well. (That's right: groups. There are actually vampire clans in Morrowind, each with its own additional stat enhancements and quest paths.) On the other hand, human civilization will show a disturbing tendency to either shun you or attempt to destroy you. Most factions will become off-limits, and sunlight can wreck your health even worse than that of a jazz musician. Cloudy skies or rain during daylight hours still provides a degree of lesser but continuous damage -- which means you don't dare sleep without securing a good place to hide from those tanning rays. It also becomes extremely difficult to follow the man quest path through the game, since many of the people involved along the way are going to be repelled by your appearance. There may be a sardonic thread of humor from the developers in all this, something along the lines of, They want to play super-characters? Sure, let's give them super-characters! And let's make it so that the super-characters have the hardest time finishing the game successfully, mu-wa-HA-HA-HA-HA...! But you can get cured of vampirism; and I like to think of this element in Morrowind as just another example of the product's considerable breadth of field and depth of gameplay. A Question of Performance With system requirements as high as they must be to power the visuals and number crunching in this game, you just know performance is potentially going to suffer. And, as usual, you're correct. Although minimum requirements mention 128 MB RAM for Windows 98/ME and 256 MG RAM for Windows XP/2000, I wouldn't advise running Morrowind with anything less than 256 MB RAM, regardless of OS. A 500 MHz processor is required, too, but I think Bethesda Softworks' recommendation of 800 MHz is solidly on the mark. They also should be taken seriously when they recommend an NVIDIA GeForce 2 GTS, or fast ATI Radeon video card. This is the bottleneck for most systems that meet or surpass the requirements in all other respects; so if you purchase Morrowind and it's running sluggishly, check online for the latest video drivers. In my case, I was running a Radeon 7200, and ran into clipping issues. Amusingly enough, Bethesda Softworks has been working with ATI to develop a general driver update, and when I downloaded the results a week ago, it completely solved my problems. Another thing to consider: set the hardware acceleration in your Control Panel to "none." I've found over time that this aids a range of graphically advanced games.
I wouldn't suggest running Morrowind in anything less than 1078 x 768 resolution, since you'll lose information on the extremely detailed screen. When framerates are poor and the system seems sluggish, try instead lowering some of the settings on the Options panel. (Note that there are numerous small game pauses--no more than ten seconds, at worst--as you move physically through geographical areas, to accommodate the loading of new data. When this happens, it isn't a system issue.) While still playing under the old Radeon drivers, I found that cutting back on the View Distance and Real-time Shadows controls helped, although they were only reduced part of the way. (I would not give up all ability to see those distant, 3D views.) Looking down at the ground before right-clicking helped prevent a slothful mouse in the mini-screens, which was also a problem.
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I mention this only to provide some perspective; when I give a game a 9.4, it's because I believe that game deserves an "A" on its report card. Morrowind isn't perfect and its system requirements are huge; but its accomplishments outweigh any reservations, in my opinion. It isn't for everybody, but then what game is? This one shows more planning, talent (aesthetic, programming, and design) and creative vision than anything I've played in a very long time. And I'll stand by those words.