As good as the game was. Why were the graphics not so great with the game? There were tons of games on X-Box, Playstation 2 and PC with way better graphics that were no where near like Morrowind during this games time.

Why did an epic game like Morrowind have such poor graphics on console and PC?

I've heard of mods for the PC that improve the graphics, I just don't know why Bethesda didn't work on that more. Was it not possible at the time?

Those games that had better graphics also didn't have the size and scale of Morrowind.

Textures size and polycount had to be reduced given the hardware that was available at the time. I first ran Morrowind on a 2003 machine and it was able to run it only after many tweaks. High-rez textures bloat up the memory and, given that the graphic engine draws everything, including stuff you don't see, polycount was definitely an issue. There's a difference between a game where the gameworld is actually a "box" and where the distant landscape is a matte painting, and Morrowind gameworld.

The graphics were great for the time. It was never seen as having "poor graphics."

When Morrowind was released it was praised for its beautiful visuals and graphics... Morrowind's visuals rivaled, or even surpassed, many of its contempararies.

Texture size has an insignificant affect in Morrowind.

If you're going to compare graphics between games, you have to compare like-to-like.

Take a look at Gothic, which has cruder graphics than Morrowind. This is because of memory limitations; unlike Morrowind, where interior spaces are separate cells, in Gothic everything is part of the same open world-space. So the complexity of 3D objects and their textures had to be limited, to allow all of that world-space to occupy memory at the same time.

The more open the world, the more memory is required to contain it.

When Bethesda made Oblivion, they got around some of the memory problems by closing off the cities into separate world-spaces.

i'm with pluto- the graphics were good compared to other games.

i just took a look at other games of and around 2003 and morrowind definitely holds its own on console.

and, most of those other games weren't nearly as complex or large in scope.

This is ironic. One of the major selling points of Morrowind back then was it's graphics. It was graphics that convinced me to pre-order the game back in 2001. I was strictly a first-person shooter player at the time and knew nothing about roleplaying games. But I saw all these jaw-dropping screenshots on Amazon dot com and I thought, "Wow, this looks fantastic!" and I bought it on the strength of its graphics.

I still think it looks great. I know I'm in the minority, but when I play the game now I don't use any graphics mods. In fact I think some of Morrowind's graphics - like water and some sky textures - look better than Oblivion.

I am mildly embarrassed now that I purchased Morrowind solely because it had great graphics. Ach, what can I say? I was a shallow person in my late 40's. I have matured enormously since then.

If you aren't satisfied with vanilla graphic I recomend you chceck some of Vurt's flora mods also with full HD textures pack. You will be very surprised what this old game can handle

But really, I've played morrowind so many times and mostly just with set of Vurt's flora mods and MGE XEgui... nothing else. Morrowind grpahics arent about details or resolutions... they have somethung more inside

I'd like to hear examples of original Xbox and PS2 games that had "way" better graphics than Morrowind. The PS2 is more advanced than the original Xbox and I played a lot of PS2 games in 2008-09 (so much newer games than Morrowind) and I cannot remember any that surpassed Morrowind to any great degree. Games like God of War and Shadow of the Collosus have nice graphics, but never seemed to be that much better than Morrowind. Now if we are talking animations . . . well that is a different story.

Yeah, I'd go with Turia, animations were the only actually inferior aspect of the game. Graphics are a tad lower than some of the games that came at similar time, but there's two things that have to be taken into consideration. One is reality- how big a game is is definitely a poor explanation for bad graphics, but how open a game is is a different story. Majority of the games that came at the same (or close to the) time as Morrowind were games with completely fixed or semi fixed cameras, linear passages, etc. That means there's only so much info that machine has to read, run, and render. In Morrowind NPCs, for the start, have so much more info than majority of NPCs in most games, even today. And then there's all the scenery that you can view from every angle, and above, thanks to levitation, so no model can exist only on one side, it has to be visible from every direction a player can approach from.

And then there's a 2nd thing to consider - first person view. Everything looks like [censored] when you get to stick your face into it. In all the games I mentioned above, that feature fixed or semi-fixed cameras you're watching scenery from afar, and floor texture looks fantastic, but if you'd get to see it from perspective of your character, you'd probably be shocked by how horrible it looks.