Levitation broke Morrowind's level design and nobody wants to admit it

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

The more I replay Morrowind the more I realize how much the devs had to work around the fact that you could just... fly. Like, entire questlines are gated behind "go talk to this NPC in a tower" but if you have levitate, you just skip the whole dungeon and float in through a window. The Telvanni questline especially feels neutered if you're using levitation scrolls.

I get why they removed it for Oblivion and Skyrim - it completely breaks verticality as a design constraint. But I also think Morrowind's weird, maze-like architecture and the way dungeons feel genuinely alien partly exists because the devs knew players might cheese their way past whole sections. It's this weird tension where the game is simultaneously built around avoiding levitation and completely vulnerable to it.

Anyone else notice this on replays? Or am I overthinking it and levitation is just a tool that's there if you want to use it?

 

[EbonyWarrior]

You're not overthinking it, but I think you're looking at it backwards a bit. The devs didn't design dungeons to work around levitation - they designed them knowing levitation existed and that some players would use it. That's different from the level design being "broken" by it.

Morrowind's architecture is weird and maze-like partly because levitation is an option. If you can fly, the designers have to think vertically in ways Skyrim never does. Those Telvanni towers aren't just tall - they're deliberately labyrinthine on the inside so that even if you bypass the front door, you're still navigating a genuinely alien space. The game trusts you to either use levitation or not use it. It's not a bug, it's a design philosophy that's pretty different from the "one correct path" approach Skyrim took.

And honestly, the Telvanni questline doesn't feel neutered to me even with levitate. Yeah, you can skip the dungeon crawl, but the actual quests are about politics and house intrigue - the interesting parts don't happen in the dungeons anyway. The levitation just lets you get to the NPCs faster, which is fine.

The real difference is that Morrowind respects player agency in a way the later games don't. If you want to break the game with levitation scrolls, you can. If you want to play it straight, the level design still works. Skyrim couldn't tolerate that kind of freedom, so it just removed the option.