To be fair, that's what we were when we started Bloodmoon. Let me explain.

It all began right after we had finished Tribunal, Morrowind's first expansion. Head Honcho Todd Howard had some ideas about what he wanted to see in the second expansion, and it was my job to turn these ideas into a cohesive story. My name is Mark Nelson, and I'm one of the designers here at Bethesda Softworks.

So, Todd had to tell me his ideas for the expansion. But, you see, Todd sits as far away from me as he possibly can. I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but he's in one corner of our giant warehouse space, and I'm in the other. Different time zones. I pack a lunch if I'm walking over to his office. It's a long way.

But, the information had to get through.

So, he pulled the big, silken bell rope by his desk, summoning Ashley, and he told Ashley his ideas. Ashley tapped out the ideas in Morse code on his cube wall to Matt. Matt transcribed all the concepts into complex pictographs, folded them into a paper airplane, and flew them over to Gary. Gary got up, walked to Ken's cube, and wrote them backwards on Ken's forehead while he was napping. When Ken woke up, he saw the reflection in his monitor, got up, leaned over to my cube, and gave me the necessary information.

"Todd wants to wear wool shorts and phony leather." Then he went back to his nap.

Gotcha. "Todd wants werewolves, Nords, and snowy weather." No problem.

The ideas were sound, but actually making all of this work together was going to be challenging. Nords were easy, as we already had them. Snow, we were sure the artists and programmers could handle. It was the werewolf part that was going to be especially tricky. There were a lot of issues to work out to make being a werewolf fun and interesting for the player. We already had a model of player werewolves from Daggerfall, but Morrowind is a very different game, and the same model wouldn't work as well in the new system. So, we started building our system from the ground up.

One of the early decisions we made was that a player should be able to complete any quest in the game while being a werewolf character. Since the change only happens at night, it made sense that if no NPC had reason to believe the player was a werewolf, he should react normally to him. So, NPCs will only react negatively to a player who actually changes to or from werewolf form in front of them. This allows players to truly roleplay a werewolf character-hero by day, monster by night. The careful player can still complete every quest in the game, and he can still spend half his time terrorizing the populace. It seems like a cool plan.

We also wanted to stress that being a werewolf is a curse, not a blessing. The wolf form is powerful, so there had to be a drawback to balance out gameplay. Since power in Morrowind is mostly item-based, the decision was made to lock the player out from his inventory while a werewolf. Anyone playing as a werewolf will have to rely on the skills and abilities provided in order to survive. Additionally, every night a player becomes a werewolf, he is immediately overcome by werewolf Bloodlust. The character's health will slowly decline until he feeds…on an NPC. So, players will need to be careful if they get caught in the middle of the wilderness at dusk.