Look, the Elder Scrolls series has never had great combat, but 2002’s Morrowind and the games before it are the worst offenders. A new mod for the OpenMW source port could be just the thing to make the open world clunker sing, though: It adds a Sekiro-style perfect block parry, as well as one of the most cleverly balanced overhauls of Morrowind’s controversial percent-chance-to-hit system I’ve seen.
Author MrArrean describes his mod, N’Garde (nice), as “What if Bethesda had another year or two to let Morrowind cook?” with a goal of “more difficult, but more rewarding melee combat.” N’Garde is primarily built around the best kind of parry: A perfect block where, when you hit the timing window, you take no damage and stagger your opponent.
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Miss the window? You still get an imperfect block that doesn’t ruin your whole day like the sluggish shield swings of Dark Souls.
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N’Garde is shockingly modular and lightweight, working with completely unmodded OpenMW and a list of 15 tested mods, including animation replacers. I love how thoughtfully it’s been weaved into Morrowind’s base systems, too: Your perfect block window and imperfect block efficiency can be improved by leveling the game’s block skill, but if you’re blocking with a weapon and no shield, your skill with that weapon type (long blades, blunt, etc.) will impact your effectiveness as well.
MrArrean even tweaked parry windows and effectiveness by weapon type: Bigger and heavier weapons are understandably superior to lighter ones, but shields reign supreme over all. N’Garde even plays nice with Morrowind’s default (awful) hit chance system, while also offering one of the most inspired alternatives I’ve seen.
One of the great filters to prospective Morrowind players is, understandably, running into the first dungeon, smacking a guy standing right in front of you, and having your weapon just do nothing like it’s passing through thin air. Morrowind is the worst of both worlds by default.
It’s a first-person action game, much less abstracted than its forebears, but it still has a very D&D-adjacent system where your skill in a weapon determines whether you hit an enemy or not, resulting in what I can only describe as a mechanical Uncanny Valley effect: Morrowind’s feedback is too good and responsive otherwise for such an archaic system to feel right.
But as bad as missing melee attacks in Morrowind feels, the game was balanced around this system, and when I’ve modded it out completely, the game just feels too flat and boring. N’Garde has a completely optional overhaul of this system to introduce “Glancing Blows,” a halfway point between misses and full hits:
- “Preserves vanilla hit chance mechanic, but – a missed attack becomes a “glancing blow” deals a maximum of 20% damage and doesn’t grant skill XP to the attacker. Time-to-kill is roughly the same, just better combat feedback.
- If ‘strength affects h2h damage’ is enabled in launcher—missed h2h attacks lose strength bonus, but instead only get reduced to 40% damage.
- Takes ‘normal weapon resistance’ and armour into account.
- While disabled attacks that are missed can still be parried, or perfect parried to stagger the opponent.”
Taken together, this combination of feedback and functionality could even result in more fun melee combat than in Morrowind’s successors, Oblivion and Skyrim. Much as I love all of these games, even more recent entries’ melee systems are still booboo, seeing you just trading hits back and forth like a pair of pugilists from before they invented ducking and weaving—why do you think everybody just plays Skyrim as a sneaky archer?
Magic is the way to go in Morrowind, but I never like being a pure mage in any RPG. So the next time I feel the urge to rock some kind of Orc or Dark Elf Nightblade on the scenic island of Vvardenfell, you best believe I’m taking N’Garde for a spin—even with my increasing aversion to modding Bethesda and Bethesda-adjacent games in such a manner.
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