Really got to wonder ... when a game has a badly-designed, exploitable element to it, at what point does using it become cheating?
I've been playing Morrowind lately. Not the first Elder Scrolls I've played, but I couldn't stand more than a little of Oblivion, so it's the first I played to any real extent. Struggled through a little bit of the main quest on a Sword + Heavy Armor fighter-type, then went off to do sidequests. Gathered some gear, mostly Dwemer, and picked up Umbra, but on finding interesting sidequests to be few and far between, I went to go do the Tribunal expansion.
This went pretty well up to a point, but when I tried to go clear out the goblin armies ... I ran into trouble. A goblin would take off about a third of my life, and two together would kill me as often as not. I was burning through healing potions trying to make any progress, and since I'd made the damn fool mistake of choosing skills I wanted to use as my Major and Minor skills, grinding up my Restoration to be able to heal myself effectively would be counterproductive against leveling enemies. So I decided to look into crafting.
And pretty much broke the game.
Went and picked up Azura's Star, and using the Daedric Wakazashi the assassin in Tribunal's play sidequest dropped as a nest egg, started buying things. Bought a couple Summon spells and remade them into farmable versions, and practiced summoning Dremora and Golden Saints until I could semi-reliably snag the equipment off them before they vanished. Created and sold weapons until I could afford badass enchantments, then made some absurd stuff.
Like, oh, there's no fast travel in the game, and yet the majority of quests are fetch quests a continent away? No problem, I'll stick Fortify Acrobatics and Jump onto an Ebony Staff, and stick one point of Slowfall on a skirt to eliminate falling damage, now I can essentially Icarian Flight across the Ashlands at leisure. Don't have time to both heal and fight at the same time? No problem, I'll stick Absorb Health in a 10' radius on my Daedric Katana, and never have trouble in any fight ever again. The only time that thing ever let me down, for the entire rest of the game and both expansions, was trying to kill Almalexia in her shrine surrounded by half a dozen High Ordinators, because they'd kill me too fast for my "heal back ~240 HP every time I land a hit" to kick in. No fight, for the rest of the game, posed any challenge ever, and the only time I ever switched that weapon out was when I couldn't afford to have the AoE hit friendly NPCs. And a single-target version worked just fine for that.
It seems kind of silly that I can cast a spell to summon a monster, take its weapon, steal its soul, and then use that weapon and soul to make a sword far better than anything the game will ever give me. And yet, that seems to be their thing. If I hadn't been going Heavy Armor, and had more carrying capacity to spare, I shudder to think what I could have accomplished stacking constant-effect Sanctuary or Reflect or Restore Health on my gear. And what I've heard of Alchemy is just terrifying.
So, yeah. Decent game, heavily flawed but not nearly so much as its successor, but ... jesus fuckshit, when does breaking a game with its built-in systems become just flat-out cheating?
