I've been wondering how to do face animations for new head meshes and when I google it, I get conflicting information.

On one hand, I've read that morrowind animations can only be made by moving and rotating body parts, as the parts themselves can't be deformed.

On the other hand, I've read that the blinking and "talking" animations are made by using shape keys. But if that is correct, then the meshes *can* be deformed (and why, if so, has no one used shape keys to animate the bodies??)

Edit: I've opened a head mesh in blender, and yes, it has shape keys. So now I'm really confused. Why do people say that doesn't work?

I don't know why they (who exactly?) say this, there are many examples for mesh deformation even in vanilla Morrowind, facial animations and creatures mostly, but also bows. Well, apparently you figured it out by yourself already.

I've read it on a few places online, like in http://www.mwmythicmods.com/Archives/CS/Comprehensive%20Animation%20for%20Morrowind%20-%20The%20How-To%20Thread.htm (the first post by Lady Eternity)

If I remember correctly September, 2002, was before Maverique gave us valuable information about bow animations. This info was an enormous boon to the animators in the community. Until then we had been forced to guess and reverse engineer and had been making some wrong assumptions.

We had no previous game to use as a knowledge base. We were figuring out everything for the first time. And we undoubtedly made some mistakes along the way. So some of the information you encounter from 2002 represents our "best guess" at the time it was written and is possibly outdated now.