yeah, no burninanting. However, I may have to get you some destruction spells, as I am starting to get my ass handed to me by the Drauger (sp?) Lords.

The only TES that's almost as good as The Witcher.

Also, there are mods that make Morrowind look awesome.
Plus, the atmosphere of Morrowind is extremely "atmospheric" in that the land mass is massive, and it has a very foreboding feel to it.
Having that ominous ash mountain right in the middle, and just the wildlife, sounds, trees etc.
The only thing I HATE about Morrowind is CLIFF RACERS.

The other thing about Morrowind I like, is, you're not a special snowflake, you are treated pretty badly by the residents, and treated as if you're a criminal and untrusted.

Oh! You can FIGHT IN THE WATER and Cast Spells in the water.
One sadistic thing I do in Morrowind is cast a long lasting "Burden" spell on someone that has chased me into the water, and is underwater with me.

They're weighted down and can't move and subsequently drown.

Cruel, but you can't do that in Oblivion and Skyrim, which is extra retarded in Skyrim, considering that their are hostile fish in the water that can attack you, but you can't attack them until you gfet on land.

There's also not a lot of Hand-holding as was introduced in Oblivion and just got worse with Skyrim.
Hell, in Oblivion, if a book gave you a quest, all you had to do was open the book, not even read it, because a pop-up would TELL you what you read, and told you everything you needed to do. FFS, let people THINK for themselves and figure the quest.

Also, the interface in Oblivion and Skyrim went all to shit, because it was ported over from Consoles, and nothing sucks more than navigating a menu on a PC that was designed for a controller with only 8 f***ing buttons.

Enter, right arrow, enter, up arrow, enter, down arrow, enter, enter, enter.
Esc, esc, esc, esc, esc, esc, esc, esc, esc.

WTF?

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Just ignore it, it is simply a nostalgia thing. Going back to it now is as fun as sticking a knife in your willy.

you use your mouse? unless you are talking more specifically about Skyrim, cause I haven't played that on a PC.

And you cannot honestly say the interface is Morrowind was good. come on. Hey, wonder about that quest I picked up five years ago. Lets flip through a ton of pages! lets plaster the map and everything all on top of one another!

All the advice I've gotten for enjoying Morrowind involves breaking the game over my knee so that I can focus on the story and not have to deal with little things like "gameplay."

I want to like it, but by the time my save corrupted I was wishing I'd spent the money on nails to pound through my dick instead, and I felt really bad about giving it to a friend instead of tossing it in the trash or something. Maybe when OpenMW comes out somebody will do something to make the game fun, and maybe I'll try it again.

I found Morrowind difficult to love, but at the time it was all I had, so I slogged through the process of getting decent at playing it and forgiving its presentation flaws. I found the stilted text-file delivery of conversations a challenge at first.

I can see why trying to play it today, people will either hate it immediately or quickly burn out on it. Skyrim is a bit more approachable for a first time player, the animations are fluid (by comparison) and interacting with the world feels more rewarding. There is more feedback. There's dialogue.

What Morrowind has going for it, and why it seems someone is always trying to bring it to the latest Bethesda engine, is atmosphere. The world is super interesting just to walk through. The factions are all varied in their outlook as well as appearance. I don't think it has anything to do with playing it first. Morrowind just hasn't been outdone at delivering so much of the Elderscrolls world to players. I mean that in the sense of cultures, environments, politics and lore.

As the engines have gotten slicker, they've had to pare back on scope.

If you love the Elder Scrolls story, Morrowind delivers. If you just want the fantasy combat, dungeon delving and killing dragons. Skyrim delivers a more pleasant experience.

Maybe if the very first thing you did was instantly exploring the entire map. However, just a few hours in I already had a character that the game apparently considered "too strong" and it began doing weird things (see further below). I certainly didn't feel like there were any boundaries to the exploration, I could just walk around without any interesting impressions or strong emotions. Exploration was a constant flow of pure "meh".

I wholeheartedly disagree. That a game is marketed as open world does not at all mean to me that I should be instantly able to visit each and every region. To me it means that there are no major geometric boundaries or too many blockades that only get lifted as I make story progress. It simply sucks, however, when an RPG fails to provide menacing locations that you need to prepare for somehow, especially if that game has friggin' character progression mechanics and tons of equipment.

For instance I much prefer the Gothic philosophy. Sure you can explore the entire map but the orcs are powerful creatures with a huge army, they WILL tear you a new one if you enter their turf - and it's common sense that tells you that, not "some arbitrary level designation" you only learn about via trial and error. The game still doesn't keep you from trying to enter their camp, you can climb and sneak past many of the orcs but eventually you will be torn to pieces if you actually do that - and it's awesome because that's exactly what everyone told you would happen! No wonder everyone was scared of the orcs and it took your wits and strength to bring change! Compare this to Oblivion where exploring the map is more like pushing a camera through generic terrain with minor annoyances in form of monsters and stuff rather than actually having a character travel through a living breathing dangerous world.

Now, it's been a while since I played it but my observations were these:
- suddenly everyone was wearing either glass or daedric armor, especially the daedric thing was perfectly moronic since suddenly the daedra didn't appear menacing at all - and despite that all the humanoid enemies were too weak
- in the second quest of some guild I was supposed to kill some goblins or something, I was already high level at the time and stumbled upon spellcasting enemies who did not at all match the dialogue and simply blew me away with fireballs and stuff
- the game neither got easier nor harder over time, the difficulty curve was simply a chaotic piece of garbage that defied any sense or logic and the game skipped around between too hard and too easy, desperately trying to do something it just couldn't - and ironically trying something that, even if it worked, wouldn't make the game any better

The graphics are functional, but certainly not the best. Actually there's about 10 mods that improve the graphics considerably. One for better faces/heads, Better Bodies, better weapons, Better armor, Better pottery/world, etc.

The world actually is VERY rich in lore, if you stop to read the books (But i'll assume that was too boring for you). However if that isn't enough, there's mods that are LGNPC (Less Generic NPC's) which make them a lot more talkative to the degree that they actually have unique local stuff to talk about that isn't just random dribble. Mods also include Morrowind Comes Alive, where random NPC's are placed in towns you, so there's archers and monks and Beggers, Paladins, Thieves/Assassins, Pilgrims, Clerics, Merchants etc. When you leave they are removed so next time you come to town there's a much better sense of people coming and going. You can also get companions. Other mods which require the enhanced MWScript add more lore to the game like being able to mine/create soul crystals.

Something big to consider is the re-balancing mods. I remember getting caught lock-picking, and got charged like a measly 50 gold. The re-balancing makes it much harder, and much stiffer fines.

The GUI, is probably not so easily fixed, although the unofficial patch does fix some of the GUI issues.



But the favorite part of the game probably is enchanting. I loved how you could customize the enchantments to your items and weapons, give them different unique flavors, simulate just about anything. Oblivion and Skyrim nerfed that which annoyed me. And completely removing spells like fly and jump for some odd reason. I found jump especially useful for multi-story houses and buildings, like Vivec.

I prefer Morrowind over the other TES games for:

Diverse game world - Oblivion was just trees, more and more trees. Skyrim on the other hand improved a lot and I love it but MW's world is unique, has so many variations and you can tell when moving from region to region, the ambient is so much more.

Armors - Skyrim and Oblivion's armor were simplified, resulting in fewer armor pieces, especially in Skyrim where you have just 3-4 armor pieces. Morrowind's armor is like: Left Pauldron, Right Pauldron, Left Guantel, Right Gauntlet...and so on.

Attributes Depth - Again Oblivion and Skyrim's skill trees are simplified, Morrowind has much more attributes. For example weapon attributes were like: Spear, Axes, Long Blade, Medium Blade, Short Blade....you get the picture.

With openMW making huge progress all the time, it won't be long before I start playing it again.

I discovered Morrowind after Oblivion and Skyrim, so my opinion that it's the best of the three isn't affected by nostalgia. Essentially, what makes Morrowind good for me is that the world is internally consistent, and not built around the player. If an area contains weak bandits wearing leather armour when the player just stepped off their prison ship, it'll probably still contain those bandits if he comes in a month later wearing daedric armour and summoning golden saints. Early on, you're going to be missing with most of your attacks, and will be mostly staying in towns and taking the public transportation between towns while you do activities for people which don't need much weapon skill. If you can afford a trainer, it's quite wise to pay for training in your chosen combat type (and unlike later games, there's no arbitrary limit to how many times you can train per level). Later on, you'll hit nearly every time.

These mechanics, both in terms of the world not being affected by your level (so you can gradually enter places and fight enemies which would once have been far too dangerous) and the direct results of the engine, help to support the narrative of what is essentially a rags-to-riches storyline, and help make it more believable than Oblivion's and Skyrim's "designated hero" plot. (Sidepoint: Although there are elements of the latter plot in Morrowind, until your character succeeds it's never clear that they're the hero in question: others have tried and failed, and you're actually given the chance in dialogue to refuse the call at one point if you want to.) The reactions of general npcs not directly tied to the plot supports that too: to begin with, as an outsider, you're treated with disdain and more or less ignored; by the end of the main quest peoples' reactions will have changed a lot and you're treated as a national celebrity. Because they didn't need to voice act things, they were able to include a lot more dialogue options than the sequels, so people are able to respond more appropriately to what you say.

Similarly, there are many things which make the world feel authentic to me, despite the poor graphics (which can be improved with mods) and immobile npcs. For instance, the way that the biases of the fictional culture are built into the dialogue, or the fact that you don't have a gamey directcorrespondence between different types of armour (the top tier heavy is by far the best, but very hard to get hold of, and the second tier heavy is less effective than the top tier light considering its downsides). This in turn means that when I see something impressive represented on my screen in Morrowind - realising the place I've been passing is only one of the many sections of the capital, or being caught in a dust storm inside one of the cities - I feel a sense of awe, and am able to suspend my disbelief and imagine that it's happening. When I'm staring up at the imperial city tower in Oblivion, or encountering my first dragon in Skyrim, I can remember more acutely that I'm just playing a game and the thing I'm looking at is just a pretty picture on a computer screen. In Morrowind, I feel that the world is more alive and feel more engaged with it than when playing the sequels, for all their higher resolution graphics and more advanced technology.

Morrowind also gives you a lot more freedom to do what you want. There are flying spells, and teleporting spells, and you can customise them to a much greater extent. You can enchant pretty much any equipable with any spell, either as a constant effect or a cast-on-use. Since there are plenty of merchants making a living by enchanting things for you, non magic characters can also get access to all the magic customisation, albeit at a high price. In the later games, that freedom was stripped away: spells giving you too much freedom of movement were removed for various reasons, only constant effect things (and enchanted weapons) survived into Oblivion preventing a noncaster from using any of the utility spells at all, and even if that hadn't happened you have either be a mage (ostensibly, at least) or pay for a DLC to get access to enchanting. In Skyrim, they removed the spell and enchantment customisation completely, in favour of prescripted effects.

I hope that the above was comprehensible: I've been typing this for nearly an hour, and it's now past 2AM.

Mod the hell out of Morrowind and you will love it. If you're into graffix... either mod it or go somewhere else. No big deal. No handholding.

Seinfeld?

Sorry, nothing to contribute, only game of the series I own is Skyrim on XBOX 360 and I lost interest while still in the very beginning.

Is there a list of mods that you would recommend for a first time player? There are so many mod for Morrowind I have no idea where to even start.