I've played Morrowind since 03 and I still havent beat ONE major questline except tribunal. Hell I don't even think I've seen the grasslands. There's so many cities and towns I haven't seen and I've made hundreds of characters. When I play morrowind I get this awesome sense of discovery and adventure that I haven't gotten from an elder scrolls game since. Now skyrim is a huge game but I've already completed and seen almost everything there is to do in about 50 hours. and I just don't get that sense of discovery around every corner that I do with morrowind. Skyrim goes by so fast, and morrowind takes forever to get stuff done it seems, but I love that. Why haven't elder scrolls games been that way since morrowind? Anyone else know what I mean?

I feel the same way. After playing 50+ hours of Skyrim I just... got bored. Then I started playing Morrowind again and it was like I was back home after a long vacation. Morrowind is just more exotic, I guess. It has a sense of atmosphere that really is an outlander visiting Vvardenfell for the first time.

I think the quest markers in Oblivion and Skyrim have made the games faster. They point to the exact spot you need to go, and trivialize some quests. One in Skyrim comes to mind. A mans sister has gone missing. He asks you to find her. The quest marker points to her exact location. No mystery, no searching, you somehow know exactly where she is. Makes no sense. When people claim that the games are being dumbed down, this is what I think about. Morrowind doesn't do this. If Morrowind was being made today, there would be a quest marker pointing directly at the Dwemer Puzzle Box in Arkngthand.

You're pretty much a god in Skyrim after you hit lv 20.
Morrowind never fails to challenge me even after I've hit lv 30.

I just started a replay of Morrowind and I realized that I don't think I have ever beaten the mean quest, I've done all the house quests and the guild guests and such but not the main story. Anyways I was working on the main quest and I probably spent 30 mins running around Arkngthand looking for the puzzle box. I also enjoy how you get directions from the quest givers in this game and you have to pretend you are detective and try to solve a quest or a puzzle, it makes the game more immersive.

I think there are several reasons for this:
1. As Rivendell said, quest markers makes you play the game "faster". In Morrowind, you have to figure it for yourself where you have to go, which often leads to getting lost and finding something completely different.
2. Fast travel - Morrowind doesn't have one, so you are basically stuck with walking, once again, making the world larger and making the game last longer.
3. More factions and quests, as well as varieties in said quests.
4. In Skyrim, since the beginning, you are already proficient in everything - every arrow and fireball you shoot hits the target, every sword swing hits the target and so on. In Morrowind you have to "grind" to become more powerful (as well to increase your rank in a certain faction).
5. The fog - I know there is an option of turning it off, but if you play vanilla, default setting, Morrowind is pretty much shrouded in fog, giving you the illusion of a much bigger world. In Skyrim, you may see for miles and miles.

Agreed with Zealot.

1. The absence of detailed directions in OB and SR means that you CAN'T just turn off the compass and expect to find anything. Quests have been designed around it, and there's really no alternative that works. Suuurrrre it's "optional"...just try playing without it.

2. FT was available to a degree in MW, but you had to either "earn" (or pay for) the ability to use Mark and Recall, or the two Intervention spells. The alternatives to FT (silt strider caravans, boat routes, ancient Propylon chambers, Mages Guild Guide teleportation) gave you a host of partial solutions that fit smoothly into the game world, while not handing you a blank check to go anywhere at a whim. You had to learn how to use the tools; then it was no problem. OB took the "real world" transportation out of the world in favor of instantaneous and unrestricted FT, and Skyrim put back one "token" alternative to FT.

3. WAY more factions, and the factions actually had some degee of interaction and effect on dispositions of the NPCs. They also had restrictions on hiring and promotion based on what your character could do, to avoid having a stupid and obnoxious barbarian as the head of the Mages Guild, or a frail Bosmer pickpocket as the FG leader. If you joined one Great House, it was difficult (impossible without resorting to a trick) to join another. It wasn't a lot of interaction, but something was better than the "nothing" we got in SR.

4. OB and SR broke the basic premise of traditional RPGs: the character improves over the course of the game. Since in the new games you start out with 0 chance of failure, about on par from a combat standpoint with everyone around you, and the whole world levels and scales to you, there is no "relative" improvement. There was hand-placed unlevelled content in Morrowind, which could be either way above or way below your character's level; that made exploration interesting and meaningful, as well as dangerous. Without failure, there is no satisfaction for success. Without risk, reward has no meaning. Oblivion felt empty and pointless, and apparently Skyrim is the same, unless you just want the juvenile satisfaction of running around and slaughtering stuff while being impressed by how "uber" you are (now with "Achievements" so you can impress yourself even more).

5. MW's all-pervasive fog was oppressive and annoying. The total absence of it in the later games showed just how tiny the map really was. Something in the middle would probably be perfect. I use MGE with a maximum fog distance of around 6, so there's still a hint of mystery, yet I can just catch a hazy glimpse of the Vivec cantons in the distance from the Seyda Neen silt Strider paltform.

Maybe cause in Oblivion and Skyrim. Exploring is a bit faster. Running/Walking is a bit faster compared to Morrowind. In Morrowind, you start off really slow and i thank thats what makes the game larger and i guess what your saying. Also the fast-travel has alot to do with. While Morrwind didn't have that.

You can disallow the quest markers, at least in Skyrim, not sure about Oblivion.
I don't agree there; my character is level 25 and he's far from being a god. Maybe because I built it as an ordinary man who doesn't use any magic nor enchanted items whatever they are (staff, ring, necklace, enchanted weapons, etc.); he uses only the shouts and the power attached to his origins. His weapons are sword and shield.

Now I'm back to Morrowind because Skyrim had me thinking that I should, at least, read all the books that are in the game so that I could build up my knowledge of the lore, and finish the main quest that I had started a long time ago, before I bought Oblivion and Skyrim.

You could select a different quest in OB, but there was always a marker, just not the big green arrow for your "active" quest. Skyrim allows you to turn off the quest markers completely, but without reasonable directions there's no way to actually find the objective other than by pure accident. Many of the quests are designed around the marker (some even tell you in an indirect manner to follow the marker), so disabling the marker just makes the quest unresolvable. Asking the NPCs about the quest or the location is useless, because their severely limited dialog doesn't include it.

[ gMemo92 - Walking and running speeds in Morrowind were related to how encumbered you were, so travelling "light" was actually about the same as walking or running in Oblivion, except that you became fatigued by running in MW, but could somehow recover fatigue while running in Oblivion. ]

Not true. I play without any quest marker, only with the map. When you must go somewhere, it's indicated on the map, you just have to use it. To put it shortly, I use this mod: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=912. I removed everything in the compass: enemies, markers etc. and kept only the directions N, E, W and S. On the map, I removed my position (although it still shows when you roll the mouse on it, oh well...), the clouds and kept the quest markers, which is logical given the fact that they were put on your map by the quests givers.

True, but you don't recover as much as you would walking.

If you are going to limit yourself yeah then obviously not. That is like saying that Morrowind is the most diffcult game ever and then go running around in it naked while fighting with your minor skills.

Yeah, but it is still a weird system. I guess they do it because people would not want to take breaks from the action-packed combat.

I'm not limiting myself; it's the character I built: no magic, that's it. It's RP.

Skyrim scales everything, so you are really no more better off at level 1 than you are at level 45.

I'm speaking in a general sense, the game as designed by the developers. The mod you use exists because someone thought the original game needed fixing.

You don't need the mod to disallow the quest markers; you just need to change two lines in the SkyrimPrefs.ini, as follow:

[GamePlay]
bShowFloatingQuestMarkers =0
bShowQuestMarkers =0

I use the mod because it allows other changes.

God I love Morrowind....I won't go into the details some of you have, but I will say this.

About 2 hours into Skryim...my character is set up and all that, starting quests, I got this powerful hankering to play Morrowind. I fought through it to get through the $60 dollar game I just purchased...but the feeling persisted. Perhaps I should quench that desire one of these days...

Also, when I hear that Morrowind "theme" in Skyrim, I remember this time I was island hopping in Zafirbel to that tune. Climbed a hill on one of the mountains and the sky was clear and both moons were out. I just started for a good 5 real world minutes.

Ah, but what if you play Skyrim on the 360, like me? The only option is to disable the entire HUD, and I like to see my health and what-not, and I like my compass (even Morrowind has one). The journal is so vague that after awhile I forget where some quests even came from, and does nothing to help me find out where I need to go. My only other option is clairvoyance, which I want to experiment with, but what if I don't want to play a spellcaster?

I know, it's hard. Anytime I hear a Dunmer saying "Nerevar guide me!", or the theme plays, it's "qqq" for me and onto Morrowind!

These boxes are definitely not good.

Well then you are probably just worse at the game than whoever said that you are a god at level 20.

I am not level 20 there yet so I will not argue.

How can you see everything in 50 hours in Skyrim? I am 70 hours in and have been to about 2/3 of the map. And I am probably being generous with that estimate too.

You can't. I have about 200 hours in with a couple of characters and have covered about half the game. It's a big game for sure but it's starting to get a little repetitive now and I'm finding it hard to stay interested.