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It's funny that Skyrim is only 2 months old, yet people already ask for mods simply because they modded the hell out of Oblivion..

The combat seems to be what kills Morrowind for most modern gamers. It's all dice rolls and stats, you don't hit something just because of your personal ability. I'm fine with that, I actually prefer it for an RPG, but I am realistic and I know most people dislike it.

So unless you played games like that before and are used to it, I try not to shove Morrowind down your throat.

I've been experimenting with Accurate Attack. This gives all combat attacks a 100% success chance for both you and the enemy. It doesn't affect spellcasting, which is nice, but the downside is that it only applies to playable races (so all non-playable creatures continue to have their normal hit chance against you). This can be combined with the Morrowind Code Patch's "swift casting" option to allow you to cast while holding a weapon (as in Oblivion and Skyrim).

There's also Morrowblivion, a mod which brings Morrowind's game content (landmass, quests, NPCs, etc.) to Oblivion's engine but I haven't tried it myself.

Seems fair. I went into the game prepared for the combat to be horrendous, but I actually found it to be perfectly acceptable, if a little bland and sometimes frustrating. I mean, usually I'm the sort of person who DESPISES having to think about detailed character builds, leveling, and all that stuff. I just want to get into the game and start adventuring. But somehow Morrowind made me relish in these things. I've started a few different characters, and loved every nerdy minute of trying to figure out the best way of distributing points and skills. And making all the core mechanics heavily influenced by numerical calculations just makes this all the more satisfying.

And after all, this is Morrowind... it's a game completely and totally about being a huge sandbox of complementary mechanics. It's about the grand scope of things, and the number of possibilities. Keeping things simple in the core mechanics (by basing them heavily on under-the-hood numerical calculations) is part of what keeps the game focused, yet open. Were the stealth, magic, and swordfighting geared more towards being intrinsically engaging, I think there's a sense in which some of what's so unique about Morrowind would be lost. As it is, every mechanic in and of itself is almost ludicrously simple. They aren't enticing. They aren't the point. They're separate ingredients that are combined together to form a whole.

I can't play a mage in Morrowind, but otherwise I think the combat is fine. As you say though, not the reason to play the game at all.

I would say the same thing for Oblivion and Skyrim though, despite their "improvements." I do like Fallout 3/New Vegas' combat though.

These mods WILL boost your performance by, well, a ton. No joke intended:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2398851


Skyboost r3, added 10 fps in the most heavy scenes on my computer, and general exploration, I get a smooth 60 FPS whilst before it fluctuated between 40-60. Which was erratic and nauseating.

This will improve performance as well:

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=47

Not a huge difference made visually, but a nice rise in FPS, as tested on a laptop with a 8600m GT, 3gb ram, win xp and a core2duo 2ghz.

Skyrim might be a low fps unplayable experience initially, but these 2 mods will add a heck of a lot more playability to your game. Just make sure to disable updating until the new versions of mods are out.

I personally though mages were terrible in morrowind. I mean, no magika regen? AT ALL? Only upon resting (and with the antroach sign, NEVER even with resting, although you can exploit ancestral spirit + antroarch absorb) or on using potions. That disappointed me greatly when I played back then, since I usually love to make caster classes.

Spellcrafting was interesting however, something I wished they didn't take out of skyrim.

As for mods, If there was a mod I would really get, it would be a UI mod. I detest skyrim's default UI.

Thank you people for the many answers :) I'll sum them up in the first post this evening...

Edit: I heard of a mod that allows to use 4 GB of RAM. Is this useful? Where can I find it?

My only gripe with those mechanics is this: I always end up powergaming, i.e. trying not to level up until I improved enough secondary skills to get perfect attribute modifiers. This got somewhat annoying occasionally and was unnecessary, of course, but I have... to... get... better... stats...
Starting with Oblivion, I used mods to change the leveling system ;)
(Although I think now I would be able to live with mediocre modifiers and simply try to have more fun with the game)

By the way: What's the leveling system in Skyrim? Any need for mods here?

Its simpler than morrowind. You get the standard "increase skill levels, get a level up" thing in morrowind, but you don't have to min/max certain combinations to get the best stats on leveling anymore.....cos there's only health, stamina and magika that can be raised, and you always add the same amount everytime you level (10 for health and magika, 5 for stamina I think) regardless of what skills you used to level. This time round there are no major/minor skills, every skill increased goes to leveling, and thus no more "10 major skills and you get a level", each skill you increase increases the experience bar, with skills with more points placed giving higher experience and lower point skills giving less. It is a lot simpler than morrowind. You get faster skill increases for certain "class" skills by activating certain standing stones. Every level you gain a perk, which you can add to any tree (each skill has a perk tree) if you've meet the requirements.

It makes the game apparently much more stable if your system has 4gb of ram or more. I've never tried it (since the only crashes I get are from alt tabbing too much usually), but I've heard it helps a lot of people. You can get it at skyrim nexus.

Bethesda patched in Large Address Aware to the game with the 1.3 patch, so you should be good to go so long as your game is updated to the latest version. The game won't necessarily use all of your RAM now unless it needs to due to large texture mods and the like, but in general the LAA patch makes the game run more fluidly.

TLDR; 4GB mod no longer required.

Are you sure that includes graphics card? A lot of people with notebooks overlook the fact that when a game asks for a graphics card it doesn't mean a little Intel chip that takes a fraction of the CPU and RAM and uses that as a virtual graphics card.

Will install and try it this evening :) I have been away for a while

I dunno... I didn't find magic to be THAT bad. I mean, it's not all that difficult to carry around some regen magika potions, is it? Granted, it's still a strange design decision considering that in just about every other mana bar magic system your magic DOES recharge, but it wasn't like it broke the game or anything (no, they had plenty of other mechanics that did that for them :3). And when compared with the D&D system, it's actually fairly forgiving (I don't know how many times I was forced to rest in BG2 dungeons).

Still, though... it would have been nice to make the magika recharge. Just like it would have been nice if they had made it possible to re-hide after being seen by an enemy (relying completely on stealth in dungeons is all but impossible until you've got a high level sneak skill as a result)
yeah, this is the problem I ran into when I got my computer. I saw "128 MB of video RAM? Aww, that should run most of the games I want to play, since I'm not interested in much after last generation." Then, when I tried running Quake 4, I discovered that 128 MB of integrated graphics card is maybe 32 MB of real graphics card :P