Morrowind was perfect. Now this was before most games started becoming dumbed down, back in 05, I remember playing Morrowind exclusively for hundreds of hours and I was so excited they we're making a new Elder Scrolls game. When I started playing Oblivion finally it felt like I was in school and just went back 4 grades. First game I can remember being dumbed down.
INCOMING LONG WINDED POST!!!
Except that Morrowind WASN'T perfect. If I could take off the nostalgia blinders for a bit I could easily pick apart several things that were wrong with the game...the character graphics were ugly, the economy was broken from the offset (venders never had enough money or really carried much in the way of things you wanted.) And spell casting was slow, to slow to make destruction magic favorable in combat. Also there were several flawed design choices, a good example being the telvanni towers, the ones you had to use levitation magic to get around in. The problem was that levitation automatically took you a foot of the ground, making you, in a sense, a foot taller in terms of the space you occupied, combine that with small passageways and, well I think you get the picture.
Also as far as "dumbing down" is concerned.....
Morrowind's customization was a joke compared to Daggerfall's. Take a look at spell customization and enchantments worked in Daggerfall compared to Morrowind and you'll see that Daggerfall had a wealth of more options. And I'm not even going to get started on the class system. Furthermore, Daggerfall had mounts, carts to store excess loot, and the ability to buy houses, ships, etc.
And before I start to sound like I'm waxing nostalgic on Daggerfall, it wasn't perfect either. For one the customization options I mentioned above were easy to exploit (you could make a magic sheild that lasted 24 hours or until it soaked up 1000 points of damage.) One town or dungeon looked like the next with a few pallet swaps. And last but certainly not least there were bugs, a lot of bugs, the games Bethesda makes now had nothing on the amount of bugs in Daggerfall.
The beauty of these games is that the open ended mod policy that started with Morrowind, (although there were some mods made for Daggerfall as well) made it so these games could be tweeked by a few clever people down the road and could fix many of the problems these games had. Didn't like the way bodies looked in Morrowind or Oblivion? They have mods for that, Wanted vampire clans in Oblivion? They have mods for that. Etc.
As to the whole hype thing, that's going to happen with any game, and Bethesda's hype engine isn't even the loudest out there (Final Fantasy, anyone?) I have yet to be totally let down by a product by Bethesda, and have enjoyed everything they've put out since there first Elder Scrolls game. Hell, I'll even pull out and play Battlespire from time to time. If there's one thing Bethesda does well is give me a large environment to explore, the freedom to explore it, and the ability to create a character with a back story, and what kind of character that person is that is of my own making, that alone is worth the price of admission to me. Even if these games aren't everyone's cup of tea.
» Sun Mar 07, 2010 12:09 am 
I've drunk the Kool-Aid and will play Morrowind with an open mind and approach Skyrim the same way...for what they *are*. - games in my favorite franchise. It won't matter what anyone else says in the end because it's about how I enjoy the game. I should get this laminated. 
