I hope so too.. Morrowind was like discovering a foreign exotic culture you had never heard about. Oblivion was like experiencing high fantasy lord of the rings copy 1167. Not that it was bad but still. Morrwind was a far more original experience.

Agreed. I remember having only explored Balmora and Ald'ruhn, the Fighter guild required me to head up to Maar Gan, and I remember it being quite the journey. Same thing with Vos and Tel Vos, the Zafirbel Bay, The Molag Amur region, The Floating Moon over Vivec, Pelagiad, and Hla Oad. Those were all such incredible experiences, I wish I could relive them all.

the most important things that need to come back from the morrowind days in my humble opinion -

the travel system - it was so much more immersive to have to find a boat or silt strider to be able to travel quickly somewhere. You had to plan a route across the land based on different silt-strider/boat routes, which was fun, and added alot to the sense of adventure.

less handholding on quests - maybe not to the degree of morrowind, but a middle ground seriously needs to be found, as there is absolutely no fun blindly following a compass markers for the entire game. Perhaps markers that indicate the localised area that the quest is in, as opposed to its actual definitive point? Perhaps a system where you have to ask npcs to find the way? Anything but mandatory quest markers, please god....

npcs - clearly having everything voice acted means that npcs can't be very in depth or unique, but something needs to be done to bring back the depth of the npcs from morrowind (that were'nt even that detailed themselves). My idea would be to mix voice and text in some way, so that you could ask a range of more specific things that would recieve a text answer, and everything quest related for instance would be voice acted.

and everyone else has said, the sense of political intrigue, and the sense that things were actually in motion within the world (imperial colonists, tribunal, the imperial cult, the ashlanders etc, all felt as if they were fighting and standing for something)

Despite loving Morrowind way more than Oblivion, i can't say anything bad about Shivering Isles (wich was great, the opening sequence alone (black butterflies ftw!) was incredible). So, i guess, what everyone longs for is unique content. I didn't play ether Arena or Daggerfall for long, but in my opinion the immersion and depth in these games is based solely on imagination. By todays standards [censored] graphics, no real voice acting, in Arena not even rooftops (because the game only featured cubic buildings). The story is what makes this games great (and by story i mean the story in each players head, completing over 9000 quests for different people and so forth). Morrowind could be considered the first "modern" Elder Scrolls game (Ok, possibly Redguard, but that never got much credit and was not well recieved by many people), and in its Role of being the first "full size" modern Elder Scrolls game, it sets the mark for all following releases, until the next revolution in electronic gaming comes. Point is: Morrowind with it's unique design, rich culture and well written story (not only the mainquest, the WHOLE story) took a lot off the shoulders of the players. You weren't forced to believe that that strange block in the middle of nowhere was an actual castle or pub or anything anymore, you could actually see it ingame. So all got "Wow!" over the rich imagination of the developers. Therein lies the magic of Morrowind. Then TES IV came out, and everyone just saw Lord of the Rings and thought "Well... haven't we seen that before?", and the magic was gone. Shivering isles plays in a completely different league, at least in my humble opinion, because ist features mostly if not only TES-Original Content. That was just awesome, and i hope that Bethesda pulls it off again with Skyrim.

I don't want to start that old "MW vs. OB" thingy thing, i'm just saying you can't view a sequel as if there where no prequels, at least, if you know of them. No one would judge about the new Star Trek film without looking at the previous movies, amirite? And there are always different opinions on every topic.

I don't want such wide feelings "captured" from Morrowind OR Oblivion. I want Skyrim to be Skyrim.

That's what we all want, i guess we just say "Make Skyrim to be Skyrim like you made Morrowind = Morrowind, but don't make Skyrim = Fantasyworld No. 17385930 MK II". If my post above wasn't clear, thats because i'm of german origin and thus no native speaker.

SNOW, SNOW EVERYWHERE!

Exactly. I was looking at this from a bit more nostalgic perspective I guess. Daggerfall was so much more open ended =/ It had it's drawbacks, but even as huge as subsequent iterations were, they just didn't convey the hugeness of Daggerfall. I say go back to a large world setting. I don't know that I'd like to see the entirely random dungeons again, necessarily.

Morrowind awed me after a day or two of playing when I realized it's implied size. Oblivion awed me almost instantly with it's visible size.

I agree with this. I don't want it to seem like they brought it back from Morrowind though. That would annoy me. I want it to seem like Skyrim. I don't want to be thinking about how similar to Morrowind the game is. As much as I love Morrowind, Skyrim is(/will be) better. Making Skyrim like Morrowind would only dumb it down. Because Skyrim is going to be better.

I agree completely. I just hope our character ends up being "the dragon born" and not his loyal side kick.

Part of what made Morrowind great was that the soundtrack was fitting with the dark mood of the world and didn't try to be "epic" like Oblivions. The one thing I don't like about Skyrim so far is it's main theme.