Intro

Morrowind is an excellent game, but it's also a deeply flawed game in terms of it's design. This mod aims to fix some of the more egregious balance issues, exploits, and cheese still present in the game.

The main focus of the mod is to improve gameplay by increasing the strategic depth of Morrowind's core systems, rather than simply increasing enemy/weapon/magic damage and resistances like many other gameplay overhaul mods do. It's designed under the philosophy that the core Morrowind systems are well thought out for normal gameplay and reasonably balanced, but the game is very exploitable, which removes a lot of the difficulty from the game, making it far too easy for players who know what they are doing. Improving core systems is a better approach than layering difficulty on top of an exploitable core, and should result in a more pleasant experience overall, where build diversity and decision making are more important, and degenerate gameplay is minimised.

This mod is designed to be as seamless as possible, and to make the game feel like it has always been this way - all features work in a non-janky way that fits the original experience.

All features are configurable in a menu available in the Settings->Scripts menu. I understand many of the features of this mod are likely to be controversial, so I have made it as easy as possible to disable and configure features to your liking. For the optimal gameplay experience (in my opinion), leave all the settings on default.

This mod requires bleeding edge builds of OpenMW. See the requirements. Do not try using it with the current stable or development releases!

Features

The mod adds a plethora of features, detailed below. Some features are marked with [Addon]. In these cases, installing an additional plugin is required, because the feature is not currently available in lua. The relevant addons are listed at the end of the feature.

Armour Rebalance

• [Addon] Medium Armour Buff. In Vanilla Morrowind, Medium Armour is not very useful. By the late game, Light Armour provides equal protection and is easier to carry. This addon buffs the armour rating of all Medium Armours in the game by 20%, putting them in between Light and Heavy in terms of protection.  Also contains versions for the LeFemme and Helm of Tohan addons. (med_armour_buff.omwaddon, med_armour_lefemme.omwaddon, med_armour_EBQ.omwaddon)
• Drawbacks to Shields. In Vanilla Morrowind, there's never any reason to ever equip anything other than a shield in your left hand (barring the occasional light source). Shields provide a lot of armour rating, and give you the opportunity to block, with no trade off. By enabling this feature, equipping a shield will give you a penalty of -5 to all your weapon skills, encouraging you to think twice before equipping one. Alternatively, this can instead be configured to give a reward of +5 attack when you don't have a shield equipped, as a way to reward duelist or "one-handed" builds that don't use a shield. Enabled by default.
• Restrictive Armour. Wearing armour will reduce your ability to reliably cast spells, with heavier armour giving larger reductions. This is similar to the magic effectiveness system in Oblivion and gives good reasons for spellcasters to use unarmoured. Spellsword type characters should find Light or Medium appealing, depending on how many high level spells they intend to use, while combat-focused characters will have a very hard time casting high-level spells in heavy armour. This encourages a higher level of build diversity and should make some of the less useful skills (such as unarmoured) more appealing. Enabled by default.
• Implacable Armour. While wearing heavy armour, your movement will be hindered. This is not recommended unless you're looking to do a hardcore playthrough or you believe Heavy Armour is too powerful. Disabled by default.
  

Resting

• Disable Resting. Prevents resting outside of towns. While the random ambush system is a neat mechanic, generally resting is a very efficient way to regenerate health and magicka quickly between fights in relative safety, significantly reducing the danger of adventuring and undermining the value of potions. You can still wait in towns and rest in beds, but you can't simply rest after each fight anymore. Enabled by default.
• Disable Waiting. Prevents waiting in town. To pass time quickly you will need to find a bed to rest, which adds value to renting at inns. This is generally not recommended but the option is here for anyone who wants it. Disabled by default.
• No Illegal Sleeping. Prevents you sleeping in an "owned" bed, similar to Oblivion and Skyrim. Enabled by default.
• No Repeated Resting. Prevents you from resting again after previously resting within 20 minutes of real time. This prevents degenerate "sleep, cast spells, level skills, rest, repeat" gameplay. Enabled by default.
  

Real Time Menus

• All menus can be configured to work in real-time. This means that you can be ambushed/attacked while looting or talking to people. This generally prevents running into a dungeon, looting containers with impunity, and running out (especially useful in a certain house in Ald'ruhn). By default all menus are set to real time except the rest/wait menu, the quick shortcut menu, and the main menu.
  

Character Options

• New Health Formula. This retroactively accounts for Endurance gains and recalculates health as if the player levelled Endurance optimally. This properly accounts for starting stats and only takes into account Strength for the initial health amount, like the vanilla game. Most mods that work similarly to this always level endurance as if the player levelled it at +5 per level, which I feel is overpowered. Worse, some of them also calculate health based on current Strength, rather than starting Strength. The attribute modifier in this mod is configurable and is set to 3 by default.
  

• [Addon] No Skill Levelling. This completely disables skill levelling entirely, forcing you to use trainers to level up. This is designed to completely undermine degenerate gameplay by disincentivising repeated actions, however I feel it is too heavy handed. It's not recommended that you use this for a typical playthrough. (no_skill_levelling.omwaddon)
• [Addon] Fatigue Matters. This increases the amount of fatigue drain from actions such as attacking and casting spells. This will make Restore Fatigue potions far more useful during combat. Installing this is recommended. (fatigue_changes.omwaddon)
• Convenient Fatigue Restoration. While fatigue is an interesting mechanic, sitting around waiting for it to recharge constantly between encounters is annoying and tedious and adds very little to the gameplay. This becomes even worse with the Fatigue Matters addon, where you will frequently be running out of fatigue constantly during and after combat. This setting allows you to meditate in order to recharge fatigue at an extremely fast rate. In order to meditate, you must crouch, sheath your weapon, and stand in place for 4 seconds. Enabled by default.
  

Economy Rebalance

• [Addon] Higher Travel Costs. In Vanilla, travelling is extremely cheap and costs are barely consequential. Costs of Silt Striders, Guild Guides, Boats, and other forms of transport have had their prices increased dramatically. A trip between two Mages Guild halls will generally cost about 100 gold, with trips via Silt Strider typically costing between 80 and 120. This addon is recommended. (higher_travel_prices.omwaddon)
• [Addon] Creeper and Mudcrab Rebalance. Normally the Easter-egg merchants are extremely exploitable, allowing players to get extremely large amounts of gold fairly quickly by exploiting their high barter gold and lack of barter skills. This addon reduces Creeper's barter gold to 1000, and limits the Mudcrab Merchants gold to 1500. Additionally, Creeper is moved to Ghostgate, so reaching him requires a lot more deliberate travelling. Highly Recommended. Alternatively, consider using Proper Balanced Creeper or Roaming Creeper instead if you prefer their approaches, they should be compatible with this mod as long as you don't use this addon. (creeper_mudcrab_balance.omwaddon)
• [Addon] Merchant Gold Limit. Many merchants in the base game have unreasonably high gold barter amounts, allowing players to very easily make a lot of gold. This addon reduces the barter amount for most merchants with more than 1000 available gold. In most cases, the amount has been reduced by a factor of 10. So for instance, merchants with 8000 barter gold have been reduced to 800. Merchants with 1000 gold or under are unchanged. Some special merchants have been left with higher amounts. Highly Recommended. (merchants_gold_limit.omwaddon).
  

Miscellaneous Options

• [Addon] No Enchanted Item Recharge. This completely disables enchanted items from recharging, requiring you to use soul gems. This makes small soul gems useful, and forces you to ration your enchanted items. It also makes enchanted items less mandatory and less godlike. Enchanting is also significantly more useful as a skill. It is highly recommended that you install this. (enchant_no_recharge.omwaddon)
• No Backwards Running. This disables running when moving backwards, to prevent a very common tactic where you can cheese melee attackers by constantly running backwards and staying out of their melee range. Enabled by default.
• No Death From Above. This prevents using weapons and makes all spellcasting fail if you're currently under the effects of a Levitate or Slowfall spell.
  

Upcoming Features

These features are currently in development or are waiting on various features to be added to OpenMW before being implemented.

• Skills Degrade over time. This allows skills to degrade over time when not used, degrading faster the higher the skill is. This is designed to prevent grinding skills and forces you to actually use them in order to maintain them. This is currently disabled as I am looking for a good way to implement this.
• Standardised Attribute Levelling. This will set all attribute bonuses to a specified value when levelling up. This is designed to circumvent the game's insane attribute bonus system, which essentially punishes you for overlevelling or underlevelling various skills at a given level. Disabled until OpenMW has support for changing attribute bonuses.
• Saving Restrictions. In vanilla Morrowind, quicksaving can undermine a lot of gameplay. For example, quicksaving and quickloading can be used to reroll the contents of chests, to repeat lockpick/spellcasting/probing/etc attempts, and to repeat hard fights easily. This mod intends to address those by limiting saving to autosaves only, and adding the ability for players to save freely a certain number of times per hour, based on their level. This is currently not available as OpenMW has no support for enabling or disabling saving as of yet.
  

Installation

It is recommended to use either the OpenMW Launcher or the OpenMW Mod Organiser 2 plugin

It is very important that you ensure that both comprehensive_rebalance.omwscripts and comprehensive_rebalance.omwaddon are installed selected in the launcher. If this is not done correctly, the mod will not function. The mod has been designed to warn you if both files are not installed properly.

If the mod is installed correctly, OpenMW Launcher should look like this:



Additionally, install any desired addons, and make sure they load after the original omwaddon.

It is highly recommended that you make a delta plugin. More information on delta plugins can be found here

Recommendations

While this mod is designed to be as configurable as possible, it's generally advised to play it in the intended way, otherwise severe imbalances may occur (for instance, using magic cast chance penalties without the medium armour adjustment may make Medium Armour very underpowered, because it will still be equivalent to Light Armour in terms of DR, but will have a worse penalty than light armour when it comes to casting).

For the optimal play experience, it's recommended that you leave all settings at default values, and enable these addons:

• med_armour_buff.omwaddon (and the LeFemme and EBQ versions if relevant)
• fatigue_changes.omwaddon
• enchant_no_recharge.omwaddon
• creeper_mudcrab_balance.omwaddon (or use one of the recommended mods)
• merchants_gold_limit.omwaddon
  

Additionally, I recommend using the following mods alongside this one:

• Pursuit (https://www.nexusmods.com/morrowind/mods/50271) significantly improves the gameplay cheese surrounding cell entry/exit.
  

Special Thanks

This mod would not have been possible without the excellent people on the OpenMW discord, especially S3ctor and zackhasacat who have both been extremely helpful. Thanks to zackhasacat for the excellent No Sneaky Sleeping mod, which helped a lot with figuring out the implementation of beds at inns.