People have different opinions, but a few of the reasons I love it so much:

It has a lot more options in how to build a character. It doesn't hold your hand by making quest items undroppable or making quest NPCs unkillable. The race and birthsign you choose actually make a difference in the game. In order to progress through the guilds, you actually have to have the skills that make sense for the guild. Better range of difficulty. More dialog.

There's a lot more reasons that I like it, but I'll just keep it short.

I hated Morrowind for not being Daggerfall II just like how I hated Oblivion not being Morrowind 2.0. Thing is I love Oblivion, but I love Morrowind even more. Thing is after Daggerfall, the TES games have been dumbed down ever since. All TES games are great and I love them even though they are "dumbed down" "steamlined" "less complicated".

Morrowind was tough. No compass, no hand holding. When you completed a quest, you actually felt you accomplished something because you were not told were to go. For it's time Morrowind had the best graphics ever. That can be said for every TES game except for Skyrim. There is better looking games than Skyrim even on the consoles, but Skyrim is beautiful enough.

Morrowind had lots of customability. Less than Daggerfall but more than Oblivion and Skyrim. At it's time, "coming of the boat" had a magical feel to it. Senda Neya just seemed magical coming into it for the first time. I always have a soft spot for that place for some reason.

You can sleep in any house. If the person who died in that house for what ever reason, you basically owned that house. Not so in Oblivon. I believe the same for Skyrim as well. Morrowind seem so huge for it's time. While Oblivon had a bigger land mass, Oblivion "felt" smaller. Skyrim captures the "feel of scale" of Morrowind.

For alot of bad that Morrowind has, there is alot of AWSOMENESS that Morrowind has that wasn't brought into Oblivion. That is why alot of people love Morrowind and prefer it to over Oblivion and Skyrim because it still lacks the options that Morrowind had.

I feel like I missed out, not playing Morrowind. Is there anywhere that I can pick it up for very cheap, so I can try it out and see if I like it? I've looked at some gameplay videos, and with good texturing mods the graphics appear more than acceptable, though the one main reserve I have is what looks like utterly atrocious combat.

It's pretty simple. Morrowind is a good game. It's a hardcoe RPG that has some more hardcoe aspects to it than Oblivion or Skyrim (though I personally feel Skyrim is actually hardcoe in ways). There was a lot of depth to Morrowind. It was obviously hand-crafted with good attention to detail. It was just a good game, and it still is. Morrowind is a game I can go back and play at any time and still have fun, even if in many ways the game is dated now. It's still a great game if you get into it. But that's the thing with Morrowind, you have to "get into it". It doesn't hold your hand like Oblivion and Skryim. It will eat you up and spit you out if you aren't careful. That's why some people have a hard time playing it today, because it doesn't hold your hand.

Cliffracers

Your first TES game is usually your favorite.


For a lot of people on these forums, that game is Morrowind.

In my opinion it was a much better game overall. . . of course Skyrim is better in the graphic department and also in combat and fluidity. Morrowind was way larger and had much better storylines and much more diversity. The newer games are way easier you can't really get lost even if you try. The main thing for me is just the depth of the game, I easily put way more time into Morrowind and that was without mods of any kind.

Because you are comparing Morrowind vs Skyrim in this time frame. If you compared the 2002 version ( as in what was available on the market game, content, features wise ) compared to Skyrim and the advancements in gaming since then, you will see why people think morrowind was so great.

God.

These thread end up being worse than when somebody mentions Obsidian. In that case, people just say "lulz bugz". In Morrowind's case, people just say "lulz nostalgia".

Believe it or not, I played Morrowind AFTER Oblivion and still preferred it. It also wasn't my first open-world game.

For me, it was the world. I had never seen anything like Vardenfell or its people, but it still managed to completely svck me in.

morrowinds story was awesome and the world was nice like being on an alien planet
i was glad when the shivering ilse on oblivion came cuz it gave me that feeling again
and therefor alone my fav expansion i hope they do a part of morrowind as a dlc for skyrim
would love to see how it looks in those awesome grafix

Good post. This is why alot of people are let down by Skyrim & at the same time are considering it "best rpg ever" because it holds your hand. Is not very in depth ( caters to a wider audience ). Those in depth players ( myself included ) are let down by skyrim because of this.

There are tons of threads that explain why Morrowind is great - just search the forums. (And no, it's not "just nostalgia" as so many people who probably haven't even played it would have you believe. There are many, many reasons that make Morrowind a great game; look through the threads to see what some people think these reasons are.)

But really, just try the game and see for yourself.

Because it has more content. More guilds, Great Houses, quests, items, spells etc. It refuses to hold your hand, it has great art direction, great atmosphere, good rpg mechanics.

It's shortcomings are too few to bring down the experience. It's Bethesda's best game to date.

I wasnt that great. NPCs were totally wooden, dungeons were extra small, and the end bad guy looked like a dork.

Mods made the game much better but unmodded it wasnt one of my favorite games.

:D

To all those people yelling "It's nostalgia," I played Morrowind last night. Instead of Skyrim. It's not just nostalgia. There's something very fascinating about Morrowind that TES hasn't captured since. I and I do firmly believe it has everything to do with how much of the lore and conversation is in the game.

NPCs in a Bethesda game flat and boring? YOU DON'T SAY. Also, Vivec.

I actually kind of liked Dagoth Ur's look. Much better than Aludin's boring generic bad guy dragon persona.

I love Morrowind. A big part of the game's lasting appeal is nostalgia- not for me, but for others. It fairly drips off of my PC monitor when I read people wax poetic over how darling every aspect of Morrowind was. No doubt, a great game. Had some really goofy things in it, nonetheless

True for some, very true. Arena was my first, but Skyrim is my favorite just because I live for today.

I thought Daggerfall was great because it was a sequel to Arena. I thought Morrowind was great because it was a sequel, I thought Oblivion was great because it was a sequel. Can you guess why I think Skyrim is great?

I'll never understand the 'If you love game X then you must hate game Y' mentality. I like both games X and Y.

Waaaah. Go to the Morrowind forum.

a lot of it is nostalgia, truth be told ES games havent really changed much sense Morrowind

I don't. Daggerfall was much better than Morrowind. Skyrim is almost as good as Daggerfall.. perhaps better.

It's not fair to say that 'nostalgia' is the reason people like Morrowind.

I've played both it and Skyrim within the last hour because I still play Morrowind, regularly, even today. Morrowind just has, in my view, a more satisfying pace of gameplay, a better story, and frankly better interactions too. There are plenty of reasons to enjoy Morrowind for the craftsmanship alone that was put into the world, the thought behind it, the depth of the main quest line versus subsequent games. Also, the amount of factions available to you is a big draw for me, compared to subsequent games. It feels like there's more to do.

I like to say the big difference between the two games is that in Skyrim, right away you're attacked by a dragon, you're using special powers nearly unique to your character, you're hero with dragon blood who needs to HURRY UP AND SAVE US FROM DRAGONS. Morrowind, by consequence, kicks your butt off a boat and tells you you're on your own. If you show up to get your 'orders' for the first quest in the main quest, Caius Cosades tells you that you're a noob, and advises you to go do some other stuff until you're more of a badass. Like I said, better pacing.

Yeah, Dagoth Ur looked really sweet IMO. His voice on the other hand..yeesh..almost as big of a "wtf?" moment as coming across Mannimarco in Oblivion.

OP, it depends on your gaming background. If you come to TES in current times, coming from other new games especially shooters/adventure games like Gears of War, Mass Effect 2, etc. you will probably hate Morrowind. Morrowind was more of a classic RPG style that rewarded players for meticulous planning, careful micromanagement of skills and abilities, and gave every tiny aspect of control to the player regarding what their character was good at and could do. Skyrim and other modern games are more streamlined, giving players less control and less versatility over what the character can do, but therefore makes the game easier to manage and more fast-paced. It's all about what you want in an RPG.

For example, if you love tabletop D&D and everything about it, I can see you enjoying Morrowind a lot because it has that same feel of numbers and micromanaging attributes and skills.

Atmosphere and nostalgia.

That is why.