StingingVelvet: In the end we are victims of nostalgia and what we grew up with though. Some people who started playing RPGs in the 80's actually like map-making! The insanity! If I didn't play Morrowind the day it came out would I still find it so enjoyable? Probably not.
You keep stating that as a fact and completely disregard that some people just might find the Morrowind's way of handling things more enjoyable. You can pull any excuse up your sleeve - but what Skyrim's system in fact does is promoting powergaming (you can't succeed without planning your character,) which just makes the system feel much more gamey (In Morrowind, you were generally thinking 'Oh yeah, if I keep swinging my club, my character will grow stronger.' In Skyrim, it's 'I'll keep swinging my hammer and that'll unlock that sweet perk which hits gazillion of opponents!' Of course, this in the end depends on your approach to the game, but Morrowind gave you a choice at the very least. You could create a character and then pretty much ignore the system completely and still succeed, as long as you remained within boundaries of that character. I actually liked that, because I set those boundaries for Skyrim as well - I do need to actively control and think about them however, which makes me feel like a walking pile of stats instead of just letting the character progression flow. Which is ironic since there was much more stats in Morrowind that you could just ignore.)
Furthermore, you are quite right that Skyrim's system ends up being more specialized in the end. But thanks to how level scaling works, you're just good at everything during the entire beginning, which can get into dozens of hours. And that's the bit of any Elder Scrolls game I usually end up playing, so as far as I'm concerned, there's no actual 'choices and consequences' system in place for Skyrim.
