T'was merely a satirical joke. That said, an Infinity Engine ES game would be pretty cool, even if I don't want TES V to use it.

The only real things that are wrong with Morrowind, are things you can't fix in the CS. CTD's, broken/useless/buggy spell effects. Ect.

Sure the vanilla game could use a lot of improvement (meshes, graphics), but then Xbox wouldn't be able to play it (as well/at all?) due to limited memory.

Exhibit one for why I hate the xbox, and Microsoft for pooping it out on the unsuspecting public. They hobbled the thing with too little RAM, and game developers had to dumb their stuff down immensely to fit. Since it was easier to just add a wrapper to make it a PC game, we all got to suffer alongside.

Deus Ex: IW is a perfect example of this. Despite being the sequel, it was actually *worse* than the first game. However, I digress. At least MS seems to have learned their lesson with the 360 somewhat.

Yeah me too. It's limiting and a waste of disk space.

Acknowledgement is not prejudice. Just because someone states a diference between "hardcoe" and "casual" doesn't mean that one is looking down on the other. You came to that conclusion on your own. :stare: It's a statement of personal preferance. The "hardcoe" gamers like it one way and the "casual" gamers like it another. Simple as that. It's unfortunate for the "hardcoe" gamers that the "hardcoe" way is becoming less common but that's just the way it is. On the other hand there is no better time than now to be a "casual" gamer. You yourself stated how people (or rather you) prefer many aspects of Dagerfall over that of Morrowind so you yourself have already acknowledged that there has been some change in the industry.

And since you asked, there's nothing wrong with oblivion either. But you can't deny that it's different from Morrowind. Having ridable horses and purchasable houses don't make it any more "hardcoe" though. What you listed are just a few immersion issues that are only a drop in the bucket compaired to what makes up the difference between the two games. I can't speak for other people but I myself never explicitly said that one was better than the other. I may have said that I prefer one over the other but I never said that one was better. In fact several of the members of these forums (most even) play both games. Even those casual-bashing, hardcoe gamers your ranting about.

I'd like to say again for all to see: "Acknowledgement is not prejudice."

for me, i like morrowind because i like the mechanics of the game more. i like having more skills, and thus more things to do. every other advantage oblivion has over morrowind has been duplicated with mods. from graphics, to grass, to distant land, to NPC schedules. the features that make oblivion more "accessible" are the ones i like the least. i prefer exploring to having a magical arrow point me to where i need to go, or to any landmark nearby. i like having to run to my destination if i cannot afford a fast travel option, as opposed to going anywhere i have allready been "instantly".

and even though statistically oblivion takes place in a larger landmass, it feels like a backyard compared to morrowind's area. some folks attribute this to the unmodded view distance. i have distant land displaying pretty much the whole island, and it STILL seems bigger to me. places just seem a little closer together. there's just more to DO. i think i had completed just about every quest packed with the game, and explored most locations in the year or two i played oblivion a lot. i've been playing morrowind "a lot" off and on, for 7-8 years now. i'm STILL finding things i never experienced before.

i've recently got into modding morrowind. from what i understand about how oblivion woks in the CS, i also think morrowind is "better" in the CS. could just be my own prejudices shining through, however. i just know that i'd have to do a lot more "dancing around engine restrictions" in oblivion, than in morrowind.

truth be told, i probably "like" daggerfall more than both later games. too bad it's so hard to mod for, i'd really like to see what daggerfall could have been if they had gotten everything they had wanted to working and implemented.

but all this is, is the opinion of someone you'll never meet. it really shouldent matter all that much =D


that blasted zombie followed me across three kingdoms, then killed me as wereboar bloodlust had reduced my max HP to 4. confused me greatly, as i had no clue what a zombie was doing in town, and why it ended up chasing me so far till i finally got tired of the thing and killed it to get the note.

I don't think it's the "hardcoe" thing that made games dumb down -- it's the time crunch. A lot of gamers have kids themselves now, so the days when you could plop yourself down and play a video game for hours on end are gone for most of them. For those gamers, they kinda need to have arrows and fewer choices because getting lost on the way to the mission cuts down on the time it takes to do the mission.

I don't mind the easy stuff for new players, but I would dearly love the option of turning those things off or adding a hardcoe mode so that I can play it my way too.

One more reason for the greater sales of OB and FO over MW is that console gaming overall has grown by leaps and bounds since MW's release. MW is an "old" game, and most current gamers won't buy something that's already more than 2-3 years old, much less 8, with obsolete graphics and all that. OB came along at a great time to take advantage of that huge increase in the market with a product which was great looking, easy to "get into", and still far more "involved" than the typical FPS. It's a great "introductory" RPG.

Morrowind had its share of "issues" as well as its shining moments. Things like Alchemy, Sneaking, Spellcasting, repairs, and even basic combat were needlessly difficult at times; failure is a great feature, but excessive failure rates at low levels just made it tedious. Spellcasting at least had a way of controlling the difficulty rate, by having custom spells tailored to your character's limited abilities, but other functions such as Alchemy had to be learned either by repetitively going through the process to get enough successes to advance, or by paid training. The failure rate was fixed, regardless of what equipment you used or anything else you did (aside from "exploiting" the system by heavily fortifying attributes). The change to a "can't fail" approach to everything in OB was probably a direct result of complaints about MW's starting difficulty (mainly the tediousness of it, not the "existence" of failure).

Hopefully, those gamers who were introduced to the series with OB, or who bought FO3 and are looking for something with the same or greater "content", are now ready for a game that's got more going on behind the scenes, rather than one which has more action and less consequences for your actions.

From the little that I've seen of DF, it had some amazing aspects, and others which were pretty awful. MW may have been a "lateral move", giving up a lot of sheer and largely empty expanse in exchange for more detail. There were things lost and things gained. I think the transition to OB lost more than it gained, although the inclusion of physics, schedules, dynamic scenery, and other additions have enormous potential, even if some of them weren't very well implemented this time around. A few of the more popular things have since been modded into MW, where possible, so Bethesda obviously did several things right.

Agh. Voice acting. When Oblivion came out I was so upset. It was immediately clear that dialog had been slashed because of [censored] voice acting. In a game like Dragon Age (or any other Bioware game), it makes sense. You have set party members, you're locked into a narrative, linear plot. The engagement in the storyline would suffer without voice acting. But for a company like Bethesda, whose claim to fame is in sandbox games, I believe that voice acting has negatively impacted the immersion. When the whole world is open to you, but you can only talk to the people in it about two topics, it really makes me aware that I'm playing a game. I feel disconnected from the NPCs. In my opinion, they had it right in Morrowind: voice phrases spoken in real time, but leave the interactive dialog in text. It just offers so many more options...And it's those options, after all, that are a huge part why we love Bethesda's games.

The only other thing I really have a BIG problem with TES IV is the completely senseless guild system. I mean, I can be in charge of the Mages Guild without any school of magic higher than novice? I mean...really? :blink:

Personally, I can forgive the "dumbing down" of the rest. I will never love Oblivion as much as Morrowind because of it, but I can understand where Bethesda's coming from.

This. And there was only one quest in the entire MG questline where it was required to cast spells, and for that they even conveniently placed a chest with the right scrolls in the same room.

Of course that implies that in the Morrowind MG quests you do have to cast spells, but that's not completely true either. Aside from levitation, but that's a must for everyone. Every situation could be solved with melee weapons too. But at least it had skill requirements.

Each successive iteration of The Elderscrolls games since Daggerfall has gotten successively worse in the gameplay department. Gone are the days of massive open-ended worlds, and random quests. I feel a lot of this is due to the fact that Beth. feels the need to reinvent the wheel with every new release. I will confess that the ombat, physics engine, and graphics of Oblivion were a massive improvement over anything that came before but the radiant AI was nothing but a timesink. Also, the game uses too much leveled loot/dungeons etc. If the folks at Beth. want to hit a homerun with their next game they would be wise to heed the following advice: Don't reinvent the wheel again. Instead take the Combat, graphics, and physics engine from oblivion, then take the time you would save developing new useless techs and make an old-school massive world with random quests, add the flava from morrowind and for the love of God reintroduce the things you keep stripping (like levitation, werewolves, a decent guild system, etc.)

Seriously, if the previews for the next game come out and it even appears that Beth. has continued the trend of stripping the good stuff out in lieu of eyecandy I won't even consider wasting my money on it. And I know, offhand six (maybe seven) people who feel the same way.

they didnt develop it, they licensed havok.

Nothing was "wrong" with morrowind. At least not in the sense you mean it.

In case you haven't noticed its the whole RPG industry, hell its whole gaming industry, that has changed. This is because more people play games now than before. More people play RPGs. This has lead to changing the values by which RPG developers make their games. Quality was the value of the old days. Now its mass appeal. How will we get more people to buy the game? And so they make easier games, dumbed down games, shallow games. If you gave the average todays gamer a game like Morrowind he would get frustrated he would quit in the first 10 minutes. He wouldn't know what to do, where to go, how to develop his character. He would get killed by mobs repeatedly.

All of this has led to games like oblivion and fallout 3 instead of morrowind and fallout 2.

Also I believe piracy has had a negative effect. Because people who enjoy deeper games are usually more computer literate. People who enjoy dumbed down games usually aren't. See where this is going?


To show you its not just bethesda look at the other great (In my opinion) RPG devs, Bioware. The people who made Baldur's gate are now making Dragon Age.
And lets not even talk about the guys who made Fallout and Planescape torment. They were gods and now they have ended up in the bottom of the barel making crappy sequels to crappy games with other peoples crap.

But who can blame them? Oblivion, Fallout 3 and NV, Dragon Age, Fable, thats where the money is today. Pointless repetitive games with a gazillion of trashy expansions and addons to keep the money flowing. People are sheep they will follow.

What is the solution? I think its the community. People who enjoy creating. People who make things because they like them, not because they are told to. The example of this is NWN, a mediocre game, turned into a legendary game because of the community content. Oblivion too. A mediocre game turned into a decent one. Sadly in my opinion even the excellent community content couldn't save it. For me partly because I was SO disappointed when I played the vanilla game that I quit after a few days and refused to play it again until a while later, heavily modded. But the flare was gone. I hated the game at its core.

But this doesn't mean that it was a step backwards. The community content for the game is simply amazing. I think even FNV was a step forward. It tried introducing a so called "hardcoe" mode. Even if it was a miserable failure, still it was a tiny step in the right direction, which is in my opinion creating 2 different versions of a game. One for the sheeple, and one for the hardcoe rpg lovers. Of course this will be limited since at some point there has to be a choice favoring one or the other side. And thats where the community comes in.

^This.

I don't know about the piracy thing, but a large part of the "problem" is, in fact, the changing demographics of gamers. However, it's not merely that games are appealing to more people, it's also that gamers are getting older. As we get older, we get married, have kids, get more responsibilities, etc. This means less time for games. Where me might have been willing to put in 100+ hours in high school or college, we are much less willing to do that as working advlts.

Which is why, ironically, I'd rather see relatively small, high-quality games that can be easily modded than large, flat games that can't. I'm not saying Morrowind was small, but a lot of the appeal today is that is insanely easy to mod for. Sure, there are aspects that are more difficult, but the TESCS is absurdly easy to get started with. For those who get the modding bug, there are community tools that can do some aspects of modding better (or at all), but the fact is that the entry bar is fairly low.

If everyone did this, gaming overall would improve IMHO. The folks that want an easy, short game get one. The folks that want to turn it into a massive epic with mods get one. This is why I have stuck with Bethesda - they seem to understand that concept.

If there was nothing wrong with it to begin with why try to remake it? What would be the point? Todd has already stated that he doesn't have any interest in making +1 games, talking about how they would kill the series. How would you even know that they're trying to duplicate the Oblivion model (which I disagree that it's dumbed down and shallow, but that's a different conversation), we don't even have any info on the next game. To me based on the Elder Scrolls series as a whole I think we should expect something very different from Oblivion, at least I hope since I don't really see a point in +1 games either.

Ok, I have to disagree, as a matter of personal opinion. I hated HATED the physics engine in Obivion. I think I might have actually cried when I first tried to decorate my house. It was so bumpy, bouncy, inelegant, and just plain difficult to get things where/how you wanted them. I've learned to use it over the years, but I still want to punch someone in the face every time I add something to my decor. It should not be that hard to put things on shelves. :banghead: And I won't even start on the creative limits, like building pillow forts in the middle of a town.

I agree and I think the same thing could be said about developers themselves. We need only look at the phenomenal success of Minecraft to see that one person with a vision can connect with hundreds of thousands of players who hunger for something different. I really hope that Minecraft's skyrocketing sales encourage a little more risk-taking in the industry itself. Though, cynic that I am, I'm not holding my breath.

I've read 1 1/2 page of this discussion... Lets just say Bethesada should read as well. Great ideas and comments was made.

I for one enjoyed Morrowind content, but enjoyed Oblivions Combat. It's obvious we want the best of both and scrap the rest. If I had the money I start working on my own project, but that is never likely to happen any time recent.

Oh yes those darn plebs ruined our video games!
Did you ever think that maybe games weren't so original back then neither,nor as complex as you make them out to be?
In fact a lot of older games are damn frustrating which we may confuse with complexity.
To answer the op,it just hasn't aged well.
It may have been one of the greatest games of the time,but as games advance so do tastes.
Action games just happen to be in at the time.I beleive RPGs are coming back in though.

compare: reputation system of daggerfall to reputation system of morrowind to reputation system of oblivion.

consider: the mechanics of these reputation systems are all transparent to the user, thus kind of invalidating the "frustrating" aspect.

in my opinion, "action" games are in because they are cheap, easy, and quick to make. all you have to do is license an engine, get a havoc license, hire a few modelers and texturers, and boom, new action game. you then spend your remaining budget on a PR campaign (including paying reviewers off for a good review.)

most new "action" games that come out are really mods of one engine or another. the most popular being source and unreal. or something based on quake 3.

All comes down to formula.

First you start with a few basic components:

Point - What purpose does it serve? What point is it trying to get across?
Personality - What is the overall theme? Are there multiple themes? What is the general feel? The flavor? The design/art direction?
Accessibility - Is the purpose one that will be widely recognizable to viewers? Are the themes presented in a way everyone will be able to understand? Or is it strictly designed for a more specific audience?
Attractiveness - Does it look pretty? Does it make people want to touch/see/eat it?

Impact - Emphasis on any or all of the above. Does it show with a one glimpse what a thousand words cannot? Does it describe with a single word what an entire gallery can't depict? Does it stick with you 'till the day you die and after on into eternity?
Presentation - How the finished product speaks for itself. Is it appealing or distasteful? For example you can have the best game in the world but if it comes off as a racist K3 "kill-blacks" hate-fest I don't think too many people would play that game. On the other hand if you played your cards right and pumped up your hype you could have the biggest unfinished piece of crap ever made and somehow get millions to try it out.

The higher it is on the hierarchy, the more Impact that element has.

For Morrowind the formula goes pretty much like:

Personality > Point >> Accessibility = Attractiveness


It was a personality game, all about the details, the mood, the feelings & the subtle play of themes like colors across general ideas. This where the Impact, & other elements, revolved around.

The point, or more specifically story, was good, but it wasn't the best, it was actually pretty average but strengthened by the personality providing shear scope of overlaying plots and events like thread on a loom the player may choose to either weave, ignore or cut.

It wasn't the most accessible game, the in-game descriptions of locations where often vague and it could take many many hours to get somewhere, there was little to no leads and no hand-holding. But it's personality stubbornly pressed on, drawing you in like a giant toy superstore for a 5 year old, you didn't have a clue where anything was but it all was SO interesting you where determined to figure it all out.

The attractiveness wasn't that great either, even for it's time it's graphics weren't the best, Unreal 1, a game that came out in 1997, looked almost as good as Morrowind did. The graphics where foreboding at best. But the personality carried the game through to the finish line, most people saw through the shoddy block-figures & grayed-out textures at the real meat of the game. I believe this (The personality) was described in the original previews for the game, as well.

Good presentation on Bethesda's part, because if all they ever spoke of it was about it's shiny graphics & accessibility, it'd be dead a long time ago.


For Oblivion the formula is reversed:

Attractiveness = Accessibility >> Point > Personality


It was definitely an attractive & accessible game. Crisp, shiny graphics with the latest (At the time) technologies, "OMG I CAN MOVE STUFF?!!" It literally BEGGED you to take a peak and see for yourself. The "WoW-QuestHelper" GPS system coupled with fast travel meant you never got lost again. The level scaling took all of the searching around out of challenge, meaning you could go to any dungeon, anywhere at anytime and get serious action. The "dumbing down" of many in-game functions meant even your grandma could pick up the game and figure out what to do in few minutes. It was all about attracting as many people as possible & enticing them with an easy to use&learn style of playing that didn't have hardly any demands on one's schedule. A real "lounge" game.

As far as point went... Well, there wasn't much. It already had a whole library of background lore already built from Morrowind to use. The story was REALLY average and it showed, but the accessibility kept it afloat, it was just much easier and quicker than the alternatives, plus it looked good.

And in the end in order to reach that level of accessibility the personality suffered the most. The dumbing down of functions and high upping on the attractiveness scale meant all round homogenization that completely crushed most of the feeling out of the game. The high-end graphic requirements meant more time spent on each individual item, meaning less overall. Not to mention keeping it simple to not have people's PCs explode. The additions of voice acting, while certainly a very attractive addition, hopelessly demolished whatever little shreds of personality where left. Now they couldn't add too much unique dialogue, either, lest they bloat the game-files.

So what was left was a bunch of dungeons that all looked pretty much alike down to the textures & layouts, but this didn't matter as much because the whole point of them was to provide easily accessible challenge with the level scaling. Several regions that are nearly indistinguishable because it would be pointless to add it in if people where gonna be fast traveling around anyway. An army of clones who sounded the same, talked alike and looked related (With some of the hideous random faces maybe alittle too "related") because the appeal was in being able to hear/have the dialogue read/presented to you, not biography or individualism.

A shoddy main-quest that reaked of afterthought was what mostly held it all together, because honestly having a complicated storyline would seem too overwhelming for what was meant to be a glorified sandbox. It wasn't designed to be a game that lasts, it was designed to be game that brings people in, keeps them busy for a while and then lets go once they get tired of it.

Bethesda, this time around, focused pretty heavily on the looks/functions of the game in their previews yet also mentioned the supposed "RPG" aspects, as I recall, remember what I said about hype? They presented the game as having content it didn't really provide in full.

At the same time they brought the construction set over from Morrowind, to be brutally honest that is the only reason the game has lasted as long as it has, because people could mod it. (Morrowind would've lasted less had they not had the editor I admit, but it would still be longer than Oblivion, as it just had more content right out of the box overall)

Really smart marketing decision, that one.


I think we can all see where this goes. Games that focus heavily on Attractiveness & Accessibility, obviously, attract more & a wider variety of players, that's how World of Warcraft got so popular. But the difference here is that WoW is a MMO, not a single-player game. I'm personally a WoW player and I enjoy the game, for a multi-player game it is excellent. But never EVER would I want to play WoW as a single player game UNLESS it is remade to follow the Morrowind formula, which is a strange statement because the game has quite alot of personality for a MMO.
However Oblivion comes off like a MMO in single player clothing, and that is an issue, it's almost backwards, well, it is backwards......


Games that focus on Personality don't attract nearly as many players, simply because in order to really appreciate the game you gotta get really Intuit = In-To-It.

Sadly in today's market that doesn't make nearly as much money. I don't think Morrowind has made even one monthly salary WoW does in all of the years it's been purchased.

Not only that, but that type of game takes alot more effort, patience, skill, inspiration, dedication, love & soul to create. And that, can be very expensive. Expensive for a small payback. That is the ultimate con of the Morrowind formula. (Not saying Morrowind didn't make alot of money but alot of games that followed it's formula never really caught on and weren't very popular, I doubt they made much) A good example would be the game "Unreal". NOT the tournament spin-offs, the original game. I hardly ever, EVER see someone mention this game let alone know about it. It's like literally off the radar except on very very specific little cult-like niches that borderline worship it religiously. Yet it had some of the most completely epic, inspiring & moody level design in any game ever. It looked like crap, simple as hell, with NO story at all, and yet I have played that game so much the disc vanished and I had to get a new one. For something so cheap it dragged you in and slapped you with it's wonderfully immersive sound effects, beautifully crafted EXTREMELY FITTING music & interesting characters & creatures you'd encounter and fight.
Many of it's maps had secrets & easter eggs that made getting lost enjoyable. It was well ahead of it's time.
But the levels where confusing as hell, sprawled on forever, the leads where nearly non-existent, and some of the weapons/fights where difficult to master, a casual player could spend a month playing the game, god forbid it is the UT2004 conversion with the additional beta levels, it'd take you a month and a half then. That's why it wasn't very popular.

Whereas games that are based off the Oblivion formula are cheap & quick to make and extremely easy to hype to ridiculous proportions, Spore would be a great example, the prettiest graphics, the easiest game-play ever conceived (I dare you to make easier game-play than what it offers, unless you make it a button that goes "You Win!" it's not possible), ungodly hype and millions of fans. Yet when it came to showtime when all that newness wore off was the shallowest game in existence. That game was so shallow that even the creature creator couldn't save it. For something that preached customization so much, it was unbelievably restrictive, limited & homogenized. And that is the ultimate con of the Oblivion formula.

Personally I think the best formula is Point = Personality = Accessibility = Attractiveness, I keep liking games then going "You know something? It needs alittle more of this, and a little less of that, then it would be perfect"

I've yet to see a game like that though. I've yet to see a game like Morrowind again.

They (Not Bethesda specifically, hell not even GAME developers specifically, but including the movie/book/TV show developers) figured out a formula that maximizes income, and they aren't interested in going back anytime soon. I don't blame them, really. But in the long run it is slowly choking the entire entertainment market to death. Too much shallow crap and not enough substance. It's everywhere nowadays, nobody wants to spend any time on quality anymore.


Sooner or later people are going to get the message and boycott this stuff entirely, welcome to the future collapse of the entertainment market, where YouTube is the new television/theatre, the Internet is the library & games like Morrowind & Unreal 1 are sought out like Peptobismol to combat upset stomach after eating the same exact flavor of sandwich for months and months.

Yup. Good old fashioned "Fischer-Price" gaming.

I mean, the game has got it's purposes, one, to make money, second, to be attractive & accessible.

When you (OK, when I'm, everyone learns differently but I'm basing this off my experience) are learning something it's best to pick the most attractive & simplistic option available to become more familiar with the subject. Just like how toddler stuff is all cute colors & monosyllable.

But the problem is when that's nearly ALL of the options. Imagine looking for a mountain bike but only finding alot of tricycles? The few bikes you do find are old, rusted and incompatible with most of the tricycle embellishments.

They (commercial entertainment developers) are over-saturating the market with toddler-style content.


The other extreme is just as bad, for example back in the old days of gaming 80's- early 90's .etc (Although I wasn't born then I read up on it, alot of the games sounded excessively complicated & vague for the sake of being complicated & vague), I just keep picturing that's where the "Basemant Nerd" & "Anti-Social Gamer" stereotypes come from, because I can't imagine anyone playing/figuring out that crap in any reasonable amount of time.

It seems it's teetering on the opposite extreme now. Which svcks just as much.

I wish they would find a good between and stick with it.

The problem with statements like this is that no one agrees what "a good between" is.

Right. On the one hand, you've got the comments here by players wanting more content, more consequences, and more options and chioces than just "right or wrong". On the other hand, you've got other players (more prevalent on the OB threads) who want "finishing moves", "combos", and other arcade features, and don't want to have to deal with useless clutter like lore and decisions, or wasting time and effort finding the next fight and the next shiny loot.

Who decides what "a good between" is? The developer. At one time, the devs may have relied on their personal tastes, and made the kinds of games which THEY wanted to play. Now, I suspect that it's got a lot more to do with what their accountants and marketing agents want, which is a short-sighted approach that's grinding down the entire industry.

Eventually, you'll have "photo-realistic" games that are little more than scripted "movies", with a couple of spots where you can divert from "sequence A" to "sequence B" with enough of a display of manual dexterity (or by using "exploits" which are readily available and obvious, for those who lack the dexterity but want the reward anyway), non of which will have any real impact on the eventual outcome. Then, the industry will reach the point where there's no point in playing because it's so meaningless, sales will fall, and the pendulum will begin to swing back to the "nerdy" side, with games advertising increasing complexity and more choices.

What was wrong with Morrowind? Just the combat system, and the character models(everything else including models and textures was on par, except the character models) I like the combat system in Oblivion way better, it was way more fun to me, some people got bored of the combat system in Oblivion but it suited me just fine throughout the entire game and then some with mods. Also I liked that physics were introduced in Oblivion, EXCEPT, the collision models needed to be drastically improved. If I stack two books on top of each other I should not be able to see in between them.

But to this day Morrowind is my favorite game. I liked the story better and also the unique characters(Tribunal, Dagoth Ur, Dwemer, Corprus diseased creatures, etc) I can't quite remember but I don't believe Oblivion had any of the same kind of unique characters?

These next three things are what really set Morrowind apart from Oblivion in my eyes.
1. Morrowind didn't have any quest markers. You were either given detailed instructions on how to find what you were looking for, or you had to ask around, or sometimes you'd get lucky and have a general map marker you could follow, or finally you could just go look for it without help. You had four options basically. In Oblivion you had one, follow the red triangle, do what's needed, follow the next one, repeat. The more realistic the better, imo.
2. Morrowind had hidden caves, dungeons, weapons, secrets, etc for the adventurer. You are really rewarded when you go adventuring. They had underwater bodies, items and chests, obscure out of sight crevices and cliffs, and even unique weapons out in the open, where you could possibly overlook them. You could loot Dwemer ruins and find artifacts for you Dwemer collection, kill someone and take their unique armor, do a quest and get a sweet fork, stuff that was very rare to find in Oblivion, or at the very least stuff that is not memorable. When they took out levitate, they took out so many interesting places they could have hidden things for the players to get, no bridges too far to jump, no cliffs too high to jump, etc. Bring it back.
3. In Morrowind, you could sell, drop, or keep any item. You were never forced to hold something because it was a "quest" item. While I agree this option could screw you over if you misplace an item that was needed for a quest, it's more realistic and fun. Maybe you sold that Dwemer puzzle box and then later you get the quest for it, you must then think to yourself "[censored], what did I do with that thing" and go searching for it. Same can be said for npcs, there were no "essential" immortal characters in Morrowind, instead you got a message telling you that you killed someone you shouldn't have. It's all part of the amazing experience I got with Morrowind, that I missed in Oblivion.
(I didn't mention fast travel because I don't really have anything bad to say about it. It's time saving, and can come in handy. If I want to use it, I can, if I don't than I won't, simply put. It doesn't have any negative effects on the game, except that fast travel probably made Beth not put Mark and Recall in Oblivion, though, I believe it should be added)

Though these whiny babies(or you might call them casual gamers) don't want anything to do with a challenge, or immersion, etc. Bethesda needs to hold their ground, have some dignity and not give in. Or focus on us, the loyal fans, but add the "whiny baby" option for them that adds all their comforts of an easy game. With that said, I will play and probably enjoy any new BGS games, whether I stop and download game fixing mods for it is another story(sad story though)