balketh
@balketh

I'd never seen this before! I found it in the Imperial Library while searching for some kind of Morrowind Art book. There are lots of old screenshots and a full scan of the artbook there too! These are staged screenshots, though in-engine, translating concept art of game and interface into engine tests, basically, but it's fascinating to see! There are a couple more in the art book, but the resolution of the scan is too small for further detail.

I put some things I noticed about them in the alt text for each screenshot (in a descriptive way, not in a discussion-y way where possible).

But a big one I love is that 'Spell Points', what came to be called Magicka, used to be green, and Fatigue, ever-poor choice of name for the resource, was blue! Absolutely wild!

Also, the UI in many different configs is likely an artifact of development, but I wonder if it was partly the origin of the very adjustable menu UI we got in Morrowind, which few if any games have matched in simplicity of customization access since.


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in reply to @balketh's post:

Ahahaha! Ahaha. Aha. Ah. Oh jeez.

I can make some guiding recommendations, rather than just dump a list on you! I'm assuming platform isn't an issue, if I know you well enough.

Biggest recommend would be playing through OpenMorrowind, because of vastly superior performance/compatibility and, frankly, greatly improved game quality.

I typically recommend ModOrganizer2 for a mod manager, b/c it uses a virtual folder system to make reordering/uninstalling/adjusting mods very easy (and connects to Nexusmods, where many of the mods are), but it hasn't been updated in a while, at least, to my cursory glance, which is odd.

An actual mod recommend would be to try out the Natural Character Growth/Decay mod (probably the lua remake for the latest OpenMW); it skips the clunky-ass skill-attribute-multipler-raising nightmare of the base game for a sleek, intuitive automatic growth of attributes based on skill choices and training and such. Makes the game generally much more enjoyable to play (IMO) without having to even think about what to train or level before resting to get a good multipler or the like.

Easiest recommend is also what I do nowadays, which is just check out a list that strikes the balance between ease-of-completion and range-of-changes over on modding-openmw, and follow along. They've got a nice guide on mod-cleaning, and lots of entries have notes on any fixes that any given mod might need - not always perfect, but every little bit helps!