>>715346263
>The fog is one of the tricks they used to make Morrowind feel larger than it is.
It's also a simple matter of reducing hardware demans. Morrowind was already legendary for melting top-end hardware for its time, and anything that could reduce the load and make draw distance shorter without excessive pop-up and jarring visual range was incredibly welcomed.
Basically, using fog was much like using darkness and rain in CGI heavy movies of that time: a way to hide limitation of technology that created them.
Though with Morrowind, it's also worth noting that they very much turned that flaw into a virtue, with the whole settings, art direction and tone being fundamentally build around that limitation. Morrowind is a mixture of dust-and-ash swept wastelands, foggy marches, and cold water-spray-covered coasts.
The entire tone of the game is melancholic and mysterious, it's a strange, unfamiliar and unwelcoming land, with a deeply tragic core story. All of those story and tonal beats were chosen to make the most of the inevitable low-visibility dictated by the limited engine and hardware abilities. Creativity stemming from limitation.
If you want to learn more about how technical limitation can breed incredible creativity, go play Pathologic 1, that game is an absolute masterclass of this approach.
And it's why this shit wasn't actually jarring in Morrowind, but became insufferable in Oblivion and Fallout 3.
