Morrowind
Main parent category for all posts about playing Morrowind
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In Which Tembriel Tries to Decide What to Do Next
Here’s a post to get caught up on my Morrowind playthrough! Not a huge amount of action in this one, this was mostly me doing some low-stress things as I think about what I want to do next in the aftermath of Caius being recalled to Cyrodiil.
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In Which Tembriel is Infected With and Cured of the Divine Disease
Meanwhile, back in my Morrowind playthrough, I finally moved the Main Quest further along! Main action: reaching Ilunubi, where I fought Dagoth Gares and got corprus from him; venturing off to Tel Fyr at Caius’s urging, to see a Dunmer wizard about an experimental corprus cure; discovering that the cure did, in fact, work; and returning to Balmora only to learn from Caius that he’s being recalled to the Imperial City, so surprise, I am now in charge of the Blades on Vvardenfell! Yay?
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In Which Tembriel Sees Some Men About a Stronghold
Hey, remember that Morrowind playthrough I still have in progress? It’s been a while! Let’s go see what Tembriel’s doing, shall we? Main action in this post: following up on getting the necessary paperwork to build myself a Hlaalu stronghold, and then heading off to Gnaar Mok to position myself for the next major plot point in the game’s main quest.
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In Which Tembriel Gets the Rest of Her Glass Armor
Back to Morrowind! This session saw me finally being able to finish out the set of glass armor for Tembriel, an expensive feat which required my running a couple of side quests for the Fighters Guild.
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In Which Tembriel Gets Glass Armor
Skyrim and ESO have gotten all my love lately, but I do still have a Morrowind playthrough in progress! So here’s a session in which I returned to Tembriel, and mostly worked on getting her more glass armor to prep her for the next phase of Morrowind’s overall plot.
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In Which Tembriel is Not the Nerevarine–Yet
And after all that action I’ve had in Morrowind in ESO, I had to jump back to the original Morrowind and move Tembriel’s playthrough along! Very satisfied to report that I finally cleared the Urshilaku Burial Caverns, and had the Urshilaku wise-woman inform me that I am not the Nerevarine. But could become the Nerevarine.
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In Which Tembriel Does Not Let the Burial Caverns Daunt Her
After the previous session’s annoyances, I was bound and determined to make some progress on hitting the Urshilaku Burial Caverns. So for this pair of sessions, I did a side quest for the Fighters Guild, for the express purpose of getting enough gold to train up more for hitting the Burial Caverns again. Result: still haven’t cleared them, but I did make significant progress!
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In Which Tembriel is Stymied by Forgetting to Save
I discovered a big problem with having had a bunch of my gaming cycles eaten by playing Elder Scrolls Online: it broke the habit I was trying to establish for myself in Morrowind of saving as often as possible. Read below for exactly how this broke my play session this time through, and cost me notable progress in the Urshilaku Burial Caverns!
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In Which Tembriel Tries the Burial Cavern Again
Back to Morrowind! Did a little more prep and decided to take another stab at the Urshilaku Burial Caverns. Got in a little farther this time, but didn’t finish it yet!
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Morrowind doesn’t work on my Win11 ARM VM
I cannot imagine there are too many people in the world besides me who meet the following criteria:
- Interested in playing Morrowind
- Are primarily Mac owners
- Own a M1 MacBook Pro (this is my new computer Lydia)
- Prefer to use a controller rather than a gaming mouse
- Has a Nintendo Switch Pro controller as current controller of choice
- Have set up a Windows 11 ARM build as a VM on said M1 MacBook Pro explicitly for gaming
- Have attempted to run Morrowind in that VM
But if anybody else out there actually does fall into this extremely niche case, it may interest you to know that I learned tonight that at least out of the box, I cannot run Morrowind well in my VM.
It does load and I can get into my prior save files from the Steam Cloud. But the game does not want to talk to my Switch Pro controller. I can’t move with it at all. Given that I have learned from setting up games on my ancient PC laptop (Savah) that I prefer to play with a controller, not having my controller of choice working in this scenario is sub-optimal.
It’s also confusing, at least somewhat. This exact same controller is working well when I play Skyrim in this VM.
But on the other hand, Skyrim is eleven years old. Morrowind is twenty. I’m frankly kind of stunned that Morrowind loads on an ARM build of Windows 11 at all.
So now I’m torn between conflicting impulses. On the one hand, making Morrowind work in this VM is not a priority. I have a fully viable Morrowind set up on my Steam Deck, and arguably, the play experience is nicer on the Deck anyway, since I can take advantage of the back buttons there.
On the other hand, I now have a technical problem before me! And it’s probably going to nag at me until I figure out a solution, or at least a plausible cause.
As near as I can tell, Steam on both this VM and on Savah are defaulting to the same controller configuration for Morrowind, i.e., a keyboard (WASD) + mouse setup. But Savah is picking up on the controller anyway. The VM isn’t, and I’m not sure what step I missed.
It’s clearly not a question of Windows in general not seeing the controller, because I can use it in Skyrim. What’s going on here appears to be entirely Morrowind’s fault.
I’ve even tried the PS4 controller we had unused in the house (it’s not mine, but neither Paul nor Dara were using it, so I’ve co-opted it for use in ESO), and that controller shows the same behavior as the Switch Pro controller does. Morrowind’s EXE just doesn’t acknowledge that it’s there.
Windows sees the controller. So does Steam. Morrowind, not so much.
At this point the only other thing I can think to try is to doink around with the EXE’s compatibility settings, and see if that helps. I will report my findings when I try that!
But other than that, if anybody has ideas for other things to check, let me know!