Open world could do what ever i imagined

It's just the allure of the Singleplayer games. ESO is constricting in your control of your character and the world itself, having to span the entirety of the continent, makes individual zones much more scaled down than their singleplayer counterparts.

I mean I love ESO, it's one of my favorite games that I've been continuously playing for more than three years. But I keep launching Skyrim (that buggy crashy mess) because the world is relatively huge and I can use mods and console commands to make myself a half nude unstoppable khajiit trailblazer...with jiggle physics!

The difficulty was real, especially at the beginning. I remember spending hours trying to kill these orcs at an orc base (can't remember the name).

I always ended up completely off track because of the random encounters. I would be going to do a quest and end up doing tons of other stuff instead.

And lastly, the first few mudcrabs I killed, one of them had a spoon! A SPOON! I thought "what the hell?" That's when I knew this was the game for me.

The pure randomness and depth really captivated me for a long time. I play other games just to past the time between TES games.

Morrowind was my first TES game, but I wasn't new to fantasy or RPGs so for me it was more about the TES lore as a whole and how that and the game design contrasted with other things I'd played.

In terms of the lore I think what drew me in was the complexity and ambiguousness from using almost entirely in-universe sources and a lot of 'unreliable narrators', which is quite different to things like DnD where you've got books telling you exactly how everything is...of course the DM or writer has the option to change that or have characters misinterpret it but it's not quite the same as no one knowing for sure. The various religions for example. People kept asking if my character followed the Temple or the Nine or what they thought about Aedra, the Tribunal, good and bad Daedra, the Divines and all these different names and it took a while to understand it, and then it came as a surprise that there were entirely different pantheons and not just different names for the same gods.

(BTW I really like the inclusion of lore books. Not a new idea for me, other games I'd played did it too, but I wish more did. It's a great way to include lore that doesn't fit directly into the stories you're telling or which no one would bother to explain to your character because they should already know.)

In terms of gameplay I really liked how much freedom you had - especially being able to ignore the main quest completely without hitting a point where you couldn't progress anything else until you did at least some of it. And it's one of the few games I'd found where you could make a genuinely evil character (not that I wanted to be evil, but I like having options). I'd always been disappointed that my chaotic evil DnD characters still had to save the world, they just got to demand more money afterwards.

Similarly I love that the character creator gave you total freedom - you could choose a class or you could choose individual skills and attributes so you could pick literally any combination and try to make it work. I spent a lot of time trying to balance what I enjoyed with what worked well and I learned a lot about the game mechanics and what I liked playing in the process.

Having said all that however I didn't really like Morrowind itself and much preferred Oblivion when it came out. Unmodded Morrowind is too brown for me and while it is very alien at first the terrain and creatures quickly get to seem very similar. I also got tired of everyone talking down to you and insulting you. It didn't help that I mainly played khajiit, but even when I played a human or elf it got tiring after a while.

Also it seems like a small thing but it was really annoying that merchants reset to their base Disposition as soon as you closed the menu. I took to carrying around lots of tiny worthless objects so I could sell them without bartering to quickly boost their disposition back up, but it made buying and selling anything annoying. (I know there's mods to fix that too, but IMO the fact that a fan spent their time fixing a problem doesn't excuse the developers from causing it in the first place.)

Overall I did really enjoy it and it's the reason I'm here now, but having played the other games in the TES series I wouldn't say it's my favourite.

That is was another entry into Tamriel...

It sure wasn't the complexity of the leveling system, the slow walking pace, or the lack of quest markers. Seriously, the amount of time I spent wandering around lost (even with the help of the UESP maps!) probably added a third to my playing time.

It was two things:

1. Spears. No, not kidding. I broke down and finally played Morrowind because I really wanted to play with a Spear. I knew from the beginning my Nerevarine was going to use spear and it totally lived up to expectations. I loved it. I really hope we get spears in a future TES game.

2. The complexity of the the interactions between all the factions. So, I was thoroughly spoiled on the Main Quest, having been reading fanfiction on it more or less since I started playing Skyrim. But the different factions, the choices you make as you rise in the ranks, and pursue the main quest was still really, really engaging!

ESO's Morrowind failed in two major ways for me.
1. Depth of Storytelling - this didn't surprise me. Nothing could match TES III's depth, and Oblivion and Skyrim wisely didn't try. I didn't expect ESO's Morrowind to manage, so I wasn't too disappointed.

2. Exploration - this shocked me. So many of the daedric ruins and dwemer ruins were window dressing only! In TES III, I could explore those. In ESO, the doors were blocked, and wandering around Vvardenfell was an exercise in "Oh, look! That place looks cool! ...Oh. The door is blocked off. Again.

I was a huge Daggerfall fan, and Morrowind in the beginning was a bit disappointing.

no mount, no wall climbing no some other things.

But after playing a while the game quickly grew on me. The combat was far better then Daggerfalls and i liked the new race Imperial (which i was at first but later went back to Breton).

I loved the quests and the impact it had on the world and other guilds. The strange alien world i really loved.

I never had the same feeling again with Oblivion or Skyrim which really felt way to far thumbed down version of the real TES games Daggerfall and Morrowind. I mean, just talk to a NPC in Morrowind. You get so much text with hyperlinks leading to more information. Also the consequences of your actions really had impact, whether you could ruin the main questline or joining a guild could ruin your progression in another guild.
Also the longer you played the darker it became. Dunmer changed into dreamers, more daedra roamed the lands. In Oblivion it only starts betting worse if you actually start the main quest (after Kvatch if im correct) and Skyrim was a save place until i finally after 3 months talked to the Jarl in whiterun.

I find Morrowind the best in the series. I really loved the expansion in ESO aswell which was a bit down nostalgia lane. But the original of course is way way better. But that said, the expansion Vvardenfell was in no way bad. Just smaller with lessen caves (I think TES III had well over 370 caves and dungeons if im correct but it has been a while)

Also i really loved the expansion. Both of them, but Solstheim the most.

Alucardo wrote: »

VaranisArano wrote: »

2. Exploration - this shocked me. So many of the daedric ruins and dwemer ruins were window dressing only! In TES III, I could explore those. In ESO, the doors were blocked, and wandering around Vvardenfell was an exercise in "Oh, look! That place looks cool! ...Oh. The door is blocked off. Again.

Totally agree with this. It felt like nothing in the real Morrowind was truly blocked off. If you could see it, you could go there. I'm neutral in regards to spears, but it does make me wonder why they were removed after TES III. Was it just too much itemization to deal with?

That seems likely. The skills and item systems were simplified a lot between Morrowind and Oblivion - for example short blade and long blade skills were merged into one and things like gloves and pauldrons came in pairs instead of individually. Skyrim took this even further, but by then there was a general trend of companies trying to simplify their RPGs to attract new players so it's not surprising Bethesda did it too.

Personally I think Morrowind was a bit overly complicated, Oblivion was about right for me and Skyrim was too simple. I was genuinely disappointed when my crazy character concept went from requiring me to carefully juggle skills and abilities to get something usable but still challenging to play to being a perfectly reasonable choice in Skyrim.

(In ESO it varies, the skill lines are easy - playing a templar gives me destruction and restoration magic, and then I can just pick weapons and armour and of course things like athletics and agility are gone - but it does involve playing a hybrid which is never popular and the practicality of a templar in medium armour dual wielding varies.)

1. The lore. Seems to be increasingly irrelevant in ESO.
2. Developing your character in a sensible way: learn a skill by doing the skill instead of magically getting better at something you've never done just because you killed enough stuff.
3. Having to earn skills in order to advance in a faction. It's silly that my Oblivion and Skyrim characters were leading guilds despite barely having enough skill to qualify to be in them. Being the Arch-Mage when my highest magic skill is under 50 is silly.
4. The look. Most fantasy games back then were very western in how they looked. Morrowind had a totally different vibe, from the architecture to the armor and even just everyday stuff. It felt alien but real.
5. The music. Awesome soundtrack, though too brief. You'd almost get sick of hearing the same songs after 500 hours, but still it was great music. When I first played Dragonborn DLC for Skyrim I enjoyed hearing the music from the Bloodmoon expansion again, though. I thought that was an awesome touch.
6. There wasn't any player housing outside of Bloodmoon (iirc) but you could make some because there were places you could clear that would never reset. There was a room in Vivec you could just squat in, I eventually cleared one of the strongholds to use as a house. Building the Bloodmoon house was a nice quest.
7. First person view. This was the first RPG I played where it was like being the character instead of looking at everything from above.

The back of the CD case had a Dunmer duel-wielding daedric daggers and so I bought it not knowing a thing about TES because it looked so cool. Never beat the game, just tried to kill guards for 2 years (I was 13)