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I think Morrowind is one of those, "you had to be there," things. It's hard to get someone who was a kid when Skyrim came out to understand what made Morrowind special, or what sets Morrowind apart from later Bethesda games other than clunky controls.
Whatever you grow up with has such a strong hold for sure, although I think that with Morrowind, throw on the hi res body/texture, controls and sky mods, with just a few clicks the game feels and looks like a modern game, and the game itself already has a way stronger lore and immersive in-game universe than any open-world game I've played since.
Oh, Morrowind is easily my favorite, and the absurdly detailed lore and interlinked world is a huge part of that. When you suddenly realize that almost everything is interconnected and even the most out-of-the-way characters are usually connected to a major faction or overarching plot in some way is fantastic. But where Morrowind really starts to shine is on the third or fourth run when you really start to realize that scope and it's hard to convince someone now to put that kind of commitment into a game, especially one that's kind of clunky by modern standards. There are just so many games now that people will play something that big once or twice and move on, but that's barely scratching the surface of the world Morrowind offers; even if you do everything you can in one run, mutually exclusive factions and mutually exclusive routes within factions mean that you'll need to play again and again and again to really see how deep it all goes.
I feel the same way, just the depth of literally every single route they've created, and I've collected the entire library of in-game books more than once and just read through all of the books I can find after I finally get to the end of a run because I know I'll want some sort of epilogue, but there isn't really an epilogue if you've done all of the side quests that you can on a particular run, so I'll read through the in-game books they have, or I'll even go through the game manual and just read about the different star signs and what they mean and trying to figure out how they enter into the game and if there's obvious tells like which npc has which star sign. The game just has a fascinating depth that has not been matched by another game that I've played so far. And other games are fantastic and deep and broad like Mass effect and even the other elder scrolls games, but I think the more run down atmosphere with siltstriders and temples made of crumbling sandstone rather than broken granite like in oblivion, the depth and the physical atmosphere and the seemingly unending retinue of characters that even after three playthroughs, you're like wait, who is this guy? He's the nephew of who? And then it turns out there's an extra story there that you never heard of before, or a reference to him in a in-game political biography, or this extra cave behind a waterfall, that's as large as seyda neen that comtains four books detailing the lost history of whatever the crap that you've never heard of before. And I know that they have a lot of information like the number of words are also very large in subsequent elder scrolls games, but their lore is not as comprehensive and convincing and compelling, even if the reflection on the snow is prettier or the vanilla fireballs have better sparks haloing around them.
I just hope eventually I get to see a recreated Morrowind in elder scrolls 9: tamriel when I'm 70 and all of the provinces are there or something.
I go back to morrowind every couple few years because the amazing dedication and man hours that the modders have put into it, it's such an absolutely beautiful game, like you can add in fantasy style street lights along the walkways that lead in and out of cities, amazing night sky is with true constellations and extra moons or planets, just so much dedication and appropriately stylized changes that modders have made to this game, that have not abated in the two decades since it's been released that even if an official morrowind never gets redone, the Morrowind you can revisit right now with the appropriate mods installed is as exciting and more beautiful than the original world that was already enthralling.
If you haven't checked out OpenMW already, definitely do so. It's a replacement engine that doesn't impact the gameplay, but does add features that the original lacks, even with MGE and the Code Patch, and greatly improves performance and stability. Their distant land implementation is so well optimized that the last time I played I could set the draw distance arbitrarily far with minimal performance impact. The latest release also added support for some very well done and appropriately atmospheric shaders, such as one that adds gorgeous volumetric fog.
Skywind is also making headway and seems to be made by people who really got Morrowind. When it releases in who knows how many years, it should provide a version of the game with more dynamic gameplay, but the same world faithfully recreated.
Thanks. I did check both of those out but couldn't get OW stable and once I realized how many regular mods there were for morrowind I had never tried, I just went hog wild with those with the mod manager, I'll probably try OW again next play through.
I'm also waiting for skywind, that project looks amazing too! And like you say, it's just dedicated fans.