Oblivion had spellmaking.

... Oblivion also had degrading equipment.

I do agree tho - Morrowind is a unique enough game to be considered best of the series by some even without nostalgia, it did some things that no other game has done ever since. Oblivion did a lot of great things as well, and made some bits worse. And so did Skyrim. I would go into deep analysis, but ... I'm way too tired.

Items do degrade in Oblivion, so you either have to use a repair hammer or take your stuff to a blacksmith and have them fix it. Skyrim was the one that cut that feature out. Skyrim also cut out spell crafting and simplified the armor system.

Anyway, this thread is reminding me that I need to give Morrowind another shot. I already give it a quick playthrough earlier this year but it ended in a comical fashion and I've yet to get around to playing it again.

Edit: Ninja'd by Fenixp

It took me six months to play. (avg 4 hours per day, 5 days per week) There's just that much to the game if you look around. It's is lore-rich and there are several options for how to play and develop your character.

The game is great. It was a very deep game with a lot of character development. I really wish they'd capture that depth with a lot of the nicer features of newer games (particularly the combat systems that don't frustrate the hell out of you).

Really? I recall after a while the game wanted to crash... a lot... Which would be my main gripe with the game, and i wish Bethesda would take a month and fix those bugs rather than shelving the game and making money as a back catalog unsupported game. You know, i bet they would change their minds real fast if there was a law where you couldn't sell a game you weren't actively keeping up to date (by say releasing patches/content once every 6 months at most).
Actually that isn't an exploit. To create something like infinite healing or something like that, you have to have Grand gems with a soul, and pay the cost of the item by 10 vs a normal casting. It means some items you could never remake like rings that give you +5 to each armor bonus. So if it takes 10 points to cast, it takes 100 points for constant effect. Unless you have really strong enchanting making that would be difficult...

Course if you boost your enchantment high enough before hand you can guarantee making just about anything... If they made it so it takes say a second per point, then you would have to have raised stats/skills for 100 seconds (for something costing 100 points) in order to use them to affect creation of enchantments, which would have helped with balancing immensely. Smaller weaker enchantments would be more common, and sorta a stepping stone to making stronger stuff...

Bethesda's engine is very sensitive to driver conflicts. I keep a clean, minimalist gaming PC and have never had crashing issues with any Bethesda game (or any game really, for that matter).

Having played Skyrim, I found the game to be extremely...dry. It is the dog kibble of the gaming world for me. I am hoping that Obsidian gets a shot to make a Fallout game for the engine, because New Vegas was a far more interesting game. Better locations, characters, wider variety in weapons, VATS and killcams...just superior all around. The only things that were terrible in New Vegas was the repetitive radio, poor interface, and the lack of a truly awesome player abode.

To me perso, this is verily the single player open world RPG, beautifully done and thus far not rivalled.

Why so?

The depth and scope of the lore has probably never been matched in RGG, arguably ;-) - nor openness of the game-world.

Be it a random encounter character with a story tragic or silly; the books (="very short novellas") in-game , a guild or faction that seamlessly fit the credo and ethos of the gamewold; it feels intriguing and plausible, and builds on.

I also like the very open character development, including the possibility to botch the main quest (but at least charitably you shall be informed) - and as such one can invite quite some suffering by wrong early build up of the character.

The alchemy is just a gem in this game!

Not to mention Morrowind launches on Win7 from original CDs with no fuss, quite like Divine Divinity.

IMO, Oblivion was just ... soulless, and Skyrim is on Steam, so,... I do brace myself to somewhat regrettable expectation that Morrowind is the best we will ever get, within this fare.

I know drivers is part of it, but there's more than that. A game that's totally stable early on wants to crash every 5 seconds later with their expansions. Most crashing was somehow related to Bloodmoon than anywhere else.

Of course maybe it's some of the dialog, as i know there are several duplicate dialog ID's that shouldn't be there, confirmed it a while back with other modders. Some plugins/mods can make it more unstable as well, but i'm recalling from a clean game without anything besides the big 3 master files, so i can't be sure...

Then of course there's cases where it doesn't initialize the NPC's correctly and talking to them crashes the game... That's always fun...

I can testify with certainty that nowhere in Daggerfall (and, as far as I know, nowhere in any other Elder Scrolls game) has there ever been dungeons that were randomized on the fly. Unless you were using some major mod or something, the layouts of all dungeons, castles, towns, houses and wilderness areas in Daggerfall -- all locations in the game, in other words -- were semi-randomly assembled from "prefab" parts before the game ever shipped. I played the game for probably many dozens, if not a few hundreds, of hours over the course of many years, and I could always count on the layout of any given dungeon being the same no matter how many times I exited and re-entered; and though all monsters and treasure (though not quest items) were randomized anew every time one entered a dungeon (and the automap record of one's exploration in that dungeon erased when one left, annoyingly), any quest-related object(s) or NPC(s) would remain where they were first generated (unless one of Daggerfall's legions of bugs messed with the quest data, which I believe could happen).

From [url=http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Daggerfall:Dungeons#Assembling_of_Dungeons]the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages Wiki[/url]: Again, I can vouch for this with LOTS of first-hand dungeon crawling experience. If, in "vanilla" Daggerfall, you go to some random, unimportant dungeon out in the middle of nowhere -- one unrelated to any quests -- thoroughly explore it, then quit the game without saving, uninstall it, format your hard drive, reinstall everything (including a fresh install of "vanilla" Daggerfall), start a new game, and go to the exact same dungeon (same region, same name, same coordinates in the wilderness), I guarantee you it will have exactly the same layout as before.

Also, The Elder Scrolls Chapter II: Daggerfall was released in <i>December</i> of '96, so it's safe to say BethSoft didn't steal anything from Blizzard.

As to what the biggest problems were with that entry in the series, I would say that -- aside from how terribly buggy it was -- the game world was far too large for the amount of interesting, unique content they had to fill it up with. It just felt kind of empty. There were literally thousands of towns of various sizes, as well as country inns, cemeteries, temples and other remote locations -- as well as all the dungeons, of course -- but most of them were generic, virtually indistinguishable from one another unless you wound up visiting a given location often enough to start to memorize it. And the wilderness surrounding all these places was even worse, just an awful, random-looking mess of rocks, trees, shrubs and jagged terrain. Hell, Arena had better-looking wilderness than Daggerfall!
I've never played Morrowind, nor any of its sequels, and I barely touched Arena, but from everything I've heard and read about the various Elder Scrolls titles over the years, it does seem like Morrowind is the game which probably best exemplifies The Elder Scrolls as a series, even with the somewhat dated graphics, rather alien environment, clunky combat, cliff racers, et cetera. =)

P.S.: Sorry, all, for the wall of text. Didn't intend to type so much.

Too much to read on this thread.

Well Morrowind was amazing at the time of its release. It was one of kind at that time and it was long and epic!

Out of my way Scum

[edit] I used to play this game bought ti from Game in canterbury for £2 IIRC, I can't remember if the Guards said what I posted, or was it just "Scum" that they said.

I might re-install if I can find the discs

Morrowind is the sandboxiest of them all probably, which was great back in the day but these days I prefer a little more direction in my open world games.
Morrowind is like "Your character is done, here's a little town in the middle of nowhere now f*ck off", Oblivion and Skyrim are more like "Alright here's some backstory and where you fit into it, now have fun in this shiny new world".
They all have things that are good and things that aren't quite as good.
With Oblivion I really hated the extremely leveled enemies of the game, I didn't spend 100 hours building a character only to have every bandit start wearing Daedric armor. It's also not quite fair for the rest of the world, when I'm within like ten miles of a dungeon it's populated with Daedric princes, dragons, beholders and tarrasques.
But when I move out of range they only have to fight one asthmatic one-legged skeever.
The biggest thing I don't like about Skyrim (of the top of my head) is the new magic system.

Morrowind, and the whole TES series, is overhyped and quite dull. Aimless wandering American-style cRPG.