Every game has it's flaws, but the good thing about making a mistake is that we can learn from it. If any of you saw my "Best Things About Morrowind" post, this is the opposite, what can future Elder Scrolls games learn from Morrowinds short comings?

Hopefully there won't be any cliffracers in the next one...

Here's a list of things I dislike about Morrowind:

• Writing - Fairly mediocre outside of the in-game books.
  
• Dilogue - I've always disliked the encyclopedia-like dialogue system. Many NPCs would harangue me on the history and politics of Morrowind and each one had the same dialogue.
  
• Combat - The numerous threshold damages, wepon reach and all other statistics boiled down to nothing when faced with an opponent.
  
• Quests - Most quests involved menial tasks. Either I was asked to fetch items or to assassinate someone. Furthermore, majority of the quests were linear offering no alternative means to accomplish the task.
  
• Barren Landscapes - Speaks for itself. Although, I found exploration in Morrowind to be interesting and rewarding.
  
• Dull NPCs - A direct consequence of mediocre writing. As a result of this, the world felt empty.

I had its flaws but it was always combat which bothered me by far the most it was just plain boring but don't take it wrong i still loved the game.

- The barren landscape. To me, the landscape is so barren, alien and dark that I can never really enjoy wandering around in Vvardenfell.
- The difficulties getting anywhere. I appreciate not having fast travel to insta-get you wherever you want in the game. But bad directions combined with having to walk around a lot of places, made it too time-consuming to get anywhere.

- Then there are the smaller things that doesn't really matter that much, but makes the game more cumbersome. Like the journal system, the inventory and the combat.

* The jarringly segmented, World of Warcraft-style, color-coded, zone-like regions.
* The cartoony giant mushrooms and Telvanni towers.
* Animations: combat animations in particular were poor even by 2002 standards.
* Wincingly ugly face and body meshes
* Dialogue: too many NPCs with identical, generic Rumors, Little Secrets, Specific Place, ect.
* NPCs stand in one spot, 24/7.
* Enemy leveling stopped at level 22.
* Specific Guild and House stat requirements for admission and advancement that were not revealed to the player.


::Edited for clarity::

wait leveling stopped at 22? the pc or the npcs?

NPCs/enemies. Most characters tend to become god-like once enemy leveling stops.

- The world is very static but it still feels pretty alive IMO.
- The amount of cliffracers. Cliffracers themselves are pretty good enemies,
but there is just way too many of them.
- Stealing stuff is too easy.
- Animations are hilariously bad.

I guess I'm one of those crazy people who don't really have a problem with the combat system.

Already said: the diary. In the vanilla it's like a permanent daedric spear in your eye.

Nonsense! You're not crazy! I'm one of those people. The combat is fine for what it is. I hated Oblivion's on the other hand, which got painfully tedious at higher levels.

Morrowind doesn't have any level scaling. The enemies are locked at their permanent strength from the start of the game to whenever you stop playing a character.

Anyway, my annoyances in MW:
Animations - The game being released in 2002 is not an excuse. Bioware had better animations in KotoR one year later. Surprisingly, there aren't any mods (to my knowledge) that improve them, unlike most of the other common annoyances, like Cliff Racers and graphics.

Sort of. Named npcs are not scaled but the type of respawning creatures are selected from leveled lists which, as the name implies, change as you level up.

The game was a chore to play through some places were poorly designed like that city (forgot the name) that was inside of a huge building, the place was just confusing to walk through. The landscape was dull, bad directions to get you around. The main storyline was dull to play through. I hated wandering around for hours trying to find a place I was trying to get to.

See, this is exactly why I don't like the term "level scaling." It's too vague to mean anything. Or, to put it another way: only the person using the term knows what he is referring to. As fragonard points out above, tougher enemies replace less tough enemies as we level up. This is called leveling.

Here are the four mechanics involved in current Elder Scrolls games:

Enemy Leveling - controls when enemies appear.
Enemy Scaling - controls the strength of enemies once they have appeared.
Loot Leveling - controls when loot appears.
Loot Scaling - controls the strength of loot once it has appeared.

Morrowind does not have scaling, it has leveling. And, as I said in my first post, enemies stop leveling at 22.

I loved the atmosphere of the game, I don't know what people are talking about. The dark landscape and relatively hostile people made Morrowind a more unique and original place. I didn't like the Journal; it took me forever to figure out that the list of quests was under "Options" for some reason. I also didn't like some of the things other people didn't like, such as the combat. I liked or didn't mind everything else though, and overall I thought this game was much better than Oblivion or Skyrim. I think people complain too much about things that don't matter much, especially the animations.

Interesting...

I wish some cities were a lot bigger. Vivec is a disappointment for me since it's supposed to be the big ancient majestic city.

Some dialogue is quite contradicting to the character saying it [insulting their own people sometimes, I had a Wood Elf talk to my Wood Elf saying he wishes all the Wood Elves would just die or be shipped off to some horrible place, it was in Tribunal]

I don't mind the combat, the magic is actually very good. I just wish the spells were a tad faster.

Cliffracers could appear a little less.

That's about it. More books would be good I love the books!

I think that Bosmer was just a Dunmer born in the wrong body. Trans-races!

HA HA! Exactly!

The biggest issues I have with the game are:

Dialog selection for routine NPCs could be better; after you've read the same local tidbit from the last 3 locals, you don't need to get it again from the next 6. Also, better filtering by race, background, and/or occupation as needed would have helped, so some other obvious foreigner to the province doesn't call you "outlander", and the above-mentioned wood elf doesn't insult wood elves as a race. The LGNPC mod partially addressed the problem, offering a lot more variety and some better filtering. I noticed the same poor dialog filtering in Oblivion, where an Altmer tells another local: "I hear there's trouble in the land of the Altmer", referring to them in "second person", as if he's not one, so it's not a "Morrowind only" problem. Dialog filtering is easy, but time-consuming to write the exceptions for each item, so it was probably a cost issue, if not an ongoing string of oversights throughout the series.

Combat used 3 of the 4 different attack choices which were available in Daggerfall, but there was no difference in hit probability between them, as in the earlier game, and therefore no reason NOT to use the highest-damage "best attack" every time, or just select it from the Options menu. That, and the lack of a "miss" animation made combat a bit clunky. It was still very effective for "resolving encounters", and I could deal with it easily enough, but it wasn't all that great otherwise. Oblivion went to the opposite extreme, making it very "action oriented" but taking away the whole point behind the stats that drove Morrowind's characters. I really can't say that I prefer MW's or OB's combat, because each did one thing very well and another horribly.

NPCs had a perverse tendency to stop in the middle of a narrow hallway or doorway, blocking you until they eventually decided to move. Mods (the "Move" mod) partially fixed that. They still walk down the center of those narrow halls (or the bridge in Seyda Neen), too often leaving barely enough room to squeeze past on either side.

Cliffracers were a good idea. Thousands of cliffracers all over the place were either a perverse and demented act or an epic blunder.

Some of the head and hair selections are atrocious, for some races in particular. Who at Bethesda determined that 75% of the hairstyles should be variations of "bald"? I noticed the same awkward selections in Oblivion, where you could have one or more each of fully bald, mostly bald, partially bald, or a cropped-to-stubble hairstyles, or about 2-3 "with hair" selections. Again, mods worked wonders.

Animations were generally poor, especially the beast races' "waddle" animation. A few exceptions, like the Corprus Stalker "hold head in hands and writhe in torment" sequence were memorable, particularly because it wasn't seen constantly.

NPCs not constantly respawning in dungeons was wonderful. Never having any chance of respawning over the course of 6 months of game time (or ever) was less wonderful. Again, Oblivion went from "not enough" to "too much", making those pesky opponents a guaranteed 3-day respawn.

Magicka didn't regenerate without sleeping, but enchanted items gradually did. In the following game, Magicka regenerated rapidly, but with a shallow pool of reserves, and enchanted items never did. Several mods addressed this issue in Morrowind by adding regeneration, usually too rapid to be balanced in conjunction with Morrowind's inherently "deeper pool". My preference would have been a very gradual regen of magicka at a rate similar to how soulgems recharged themselves.

Oh yes, the limited "tutorial" at the start consists of "here's how to stab with a weapon, you can figure the rest out for yourself". That's pretty daunting for a new player. Ideally, having each Guild cover a part of the tutorial would have allowed you to learn things the way you would learn them otherwise, by asking those who actually know about them. If you don't care about them, you never ask, and don't get it force-fed like in OB.

There is the http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=9020 mod.

i guess my problem with it was that it ended

i would have liked to have met sotha sil before he died even if he wouldn't have cared.

Journal was terrible had to go through pages just to find where the hell the quest is at!