Vivec City's architecture is genuinely unsettling and I can't explain why

[EbonyWarrior]

So I've been replaying Morrowind on OpenMW and I keep getting stuck just walking around Vivec City for way too long. Not because I'm lost (okay, maybe a little), but because the whole thing just feels... wrong in a way Skyrim's holds never do.

Like, Whiterun is pretty, the Imperial City is dense and busy, but Vivec is this massive vertical maze with those floating islands and the weird strut system and you're constantly on these narrow bridges over nothing. The proportions are off. The NPCs are sparse. There's this constant sense that you're trespassing in something that wasn't designed for normal people to actually live in, which I guess makes sense given the whole Tribunal Temple situation, but it actually works as atmosphere in a way modern TES design doesn't really attempt anymore.

Skyrim's cities feel like theme parks compared to this. Everything's accessible, everything makes sense, you can see where you're going. Vivec actively doesn't want you to understand it immediately. You have to actually explore and get turned around and stumble into the right canton by accident.

Anyone else get this feeling or am I reading too much into some jank level design from 2002?

 

[ScrollsOfTamriel]

You're not reading too much into it, honestly. Vivec's design is intentional in a way that goes beyond technical limitations. The city is literally built around the worship of a god-man whose whole cosmology is about paradox and incomprehensibility - Vivec's 36 Lessons are deliberately written to be contradictory and impossible to parse completely. So the architecture reflecting that, being disorienting and non-Euclidean in a way that makes you feel like an outsider, tracks thematically.

The sparseness is part of it too. Morrowind's Vivec feels like a place where the Dunmer have adapted to living in something alien and fundamentally hostile, rather than a place they built for themselves. It's a monument first, a city second. Skyrim's holds are all basically the same template - they're functional, they're comfortable, they're designed around the player's navigation. Vivec doesn't care if you're comfortable. It's got the strut system and the floating islands because that's what serves the Temple's purposes, and you just have to deal with it.

The narrow bridges over nothing especially - that's genuinely eerie in a way that works. You're constantly aware of the drop, aware of how precarious everything is. It makes the city feel unstable, like it could collapse at any moment, which is kind of a perfect metaphor for the Tribunal's entire situation by the time of Morrowind's events.

I think that's exactly why Skyrim and the newer games moved away from it. It's less accessible, it's harder to navigate, it doesn't feel good in the immediate moment-to-moment way that modern design prioritizes. But you lose something in that trade-off.