karnak1: I considered Daggerfall to be almost perfect.
ALMOST
There was a stupid gaming design decision that ruined the game for me. The fact that you had random dungeons (except for the main quest ones).
Every time you got out of a dungeon, if you entered it again the layout would be completely randomised. That meant that all the hours you spent exploring it would be for nothing if you had to go out and come back again.
If you had the need to find item X or kill monster Y, you could spend hours on a dungeon. But if, for some reason, you had to leave (health too low, lack of enough XP stats to kill certain beasts or cast specific spells) and decided to return again... BAM... a completely new layout.
That was just stupid. I suspect that the "random" idea came from the Diablo games, which were "the thing" in those times.
An example of how copying a certain gameplay idea from another game in order to attract more public can go terribly wrong.
But maybe that's just my opinion: A poor design decision that ruined what would otherwise be a near perfect CRPG experience.
Diablo was a different take on Rogue. The dungeons were randomly generated, THEN baked into the code, as HunchBluntly stated. Meaning that the maps are the same every time. You could always tell a main quest dungeon though because those were hand crafted and felt like it.
I think due to technological constraints, Morrowind scaled back on what Daggerfall did a bit. And perhaps its that way with the newer games too. But they admittedly streamlined those much more for the console audiences, which upset many PC RPG gamers as Morrowind was a great compromise of handcrafted beauty and scope. Oblivion and Skyrim mostly exist to be eye candy. Oblivion's skill lumped large and illogical groups of skills together, and then Skyrim did it even further (a stiletto and mace use the same skill set?) to the point that I don't want to play it. Perks were ok... except I can now learn about shield braking with an axe without ever using one. It just killed a lot of it for me. The introduction of mundane jobs (chopping wood, etc) and some radiant quests were meh. But welcome.
Morrowind combined many of the best features of Daggerfall (a few of the worst in complex and repetitive dialog trees and combat). I hate the new dialog in the games because they are SO limited because everything is voiced. I liked Morrowind's to an extent, and would love to see it brought back and tweaked so that everyone doesn't say the exact same thing about everything. I think one of the biggest mistakes in gaming was deciding to voice ALL dialog. It's fine the way Baldur's Gate did it. You get an introductory line from a character, and the rest is all written out in thought provoking ways that really plays out well. Then you can have MANY MANY more options for speech instead of what you can fit in your game package with vocalized speech.
But pretty much the reason Morrowind is remember so fondly is because it didn't treat you like a kid with ADD who can't find his own shoes. It treated you like an adventurer. People gave directions to a place, and that's what you got. You followed landmarks and road signs, not a glowing arrow on your compass. The newer games, if you even remove the quest marker, there's no way to find your target, because the game was built with the extensive hand holding in mind. This was done for newer gamers with short attention spans and who play for shorter periods of time in a sitting (but play more over all than older gamers). Unfortunately that's just the way things are going and really great games that make you work for the prize are deemed "needlessly complex" or "broken" by audiences.
Games like Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2 are the exception these days when at one time, games like this were the standard. Morrowind represents for most games the right amount of old school complexity (before the games just went full retard, and you never go full retard).
anomaly: O.O
Mods list. Please!
I never finished MW. Never even really got that far into it, but I want to play it through to the end with as much of the original game intact. Better meshes and textures wouldn't be bad though!
You'll need a beefy machine to PLAY it looking like that. You can get it looking nice and playable, but my pretty decent machine chugs with some of the settings turned up on MGE and the MGSO.