Title says it all. What was the first thing you felt about Oblivion(or Morrowind) after playing for the first time? For me, I was lost and amazed. The view, forests, lakes.. It was simply amazing that I broke 20 hours in my first playthrough.

Also made a couple of mistakes.

First, I mistook the Roxey Inn, THE ROXEY INN, for the goddamned Fighters Guild. Probably because there was a Legionnaire and the Breton and his crew. The Innkeeper giving out the bounty for the necromancer's head just about made a fool out of me.

AND, mistaking Bruma for Bravil. Ha! I also took the Atronach birtsign for an Orc, 'cuz it looked cool and all that stuff. Got turned into a vampire the second I entered Barren Cave.
---

How about you guys? What sort of newbie mischief did you make when playing OB or MW for the first time? List 'em all!

Well the first thing I remember was being amazed and not sure where to go. I didn't know about the fast travel so I started going towards the arrow on my map. I ended up in the IC somehow and I attacked the first guard I saw "because I wanted his armor." After many reloads I finally killed a guard at level 1 (I didn't know anything about this "level up" business). Got his stuff and walked into town. Many reloads after that I started a new game. This character I spent all my time breaking into random houses in the IC "Because there surely is something valuable in one of these houses." A few hours later I found this was not the case; new character. Then I made a series of characters that did nothing but go into dungeons "because I'll surely find a valuable/powerful artifact." Not the case. And all of them were terrible characters. When I was choosing my class I found out how to make my own and made just terrible decisions. I remember making a wood elf that was supposed to wear heavy armor, shoot arrows, fight with a sword or axe, summon creatures, and cast destructive spells. It was a terrible character and he did not last long. My cousin finally made a character for me (it was his game and xbox) and I did pretty well with it. I was still killing guards and stealing anything that wasn't nailed down but the character worked. After a few hours with that character my cousin finally pointed out that I should level up.

Oblivion was my first RPG.

Unless one considers the Rainbow Six series an RPG (yeah, right) then Oblivion was my first RPG as well.

On the XBox, no less. I was so terrified through the entire tutorial dungeon, I remember how relieved I was when I finally stepped out onto the shore of Lake Rumare in the dusk. It was like a breeze of fresh air moved through the room when I saw the stars.

Then I was totally awed by how I could roam freely over this brave new world. No invisible walls or anything. I could walk into the water and end up swimming, or move underwater if I wanted to. The flexibility of movement within the game world was totally inspiring. But even more so was seeing how the grass and the leaves moved in the breeze, how the sky changed with every passing game hour.

I still remember my first sunrise in Tamriel. I just stopped and stared at it, my mouth open. It was so realistic!

And yes, I got totally lost trying to get to Weynon Priory. I thought that little northern bridge was the Great Bridge at Weye, and was totally confused as to where the inn and settlement were on the other side of the lake, until I realized uh, there's a compass, and uh, it's telling me I'm going north, and uh, I ought to be heading west and - oh, there's the quest arrow!

I know people complained that Cyrodiil was so small, but believe me, walking to Weynon Priory I couldn't get over how long it took!

And of course, seeing my first horse. Like the sunrise, I couldn't stop staring at this realistic clump of pixels and trying to figure out how to get one of those!

I hadn’t played video games at all before Oblivion, and I’d only seen games like the COD series and Resident Evil played. So I had no idea what to expect. Or how to operate a controller. My first Oblivion character was a Nord woman, I think maybe a spellsword (I went with whatever Baurus suggested) born under the Lord, since I didn’t know that everyone gets a starter healing spell. I quickly went from astonished at how wide open and beautiful the world was to how shocked that everything wanted to kill us! The first real enemy we encountered was a group of goblins. Many fiery deaths resulted, until we learned how to run away. Very soon after the hill of goblin terror, we experienced the blinking red light of death on the PS3. Thus went my first character into the Dreamsleeve.

Then came Rowyn, the Imperial spellsword (thanks again, Baurus) who quickly shot up to about level twenty something. Main quest? Yeah, at that level it was difficult. Especially since I hadn’t quite mastered the controller. Then I read the manual, and things got better. Rowyn rocks, I don’t get to spend enough time with her.

The funniest thing for me early on was when Rowyn blundered into the terrified Altmer on the road to Kvatch. At that point we didn’t really get what the main quest was about, and hadn’t discovered the map/compass. So the guy was like “Run for your lives!” and we did! Then when we finally got some distance away, it was “Holy crap Jauffre wants us to go to Kvatch?! Doesn’t he know there are daedra running all over the place there?!”

The first thing I felt about Oblivion was "Goddess, I will never be able to play this game!" Because my computer was so slow, it literally could not do the face generation, let alone actual gameplay. About 2 years later I gave it another go with a newer computer (I think it was a core2 duo at the time), and I thought, wow, now that I have a machine 2 generations ahead of the game, it actually works!

The first thing I felt was "Bugger me, this is scary." I was playing it on my friend's Xbox360, in the Imperial Prison dungeon. The graphics were so realistic, and the dungeon music incredibly atmospheric. I nearly crapped myself when the two (monstrously large) rats came leaping up at my character from the hole in the wall.

I felt both amazement and terror , i was so scared of dungeons , darkness , and wicked nasties

but i loved the rolling vineyards , the towns and the easy safe little quests.

Yes , i was 10 17 when i started playing.

My first ES game was in fact Oblivion and it wasn´t like anything I´ve ever played before. I was completely amazed and absorbed by it! Coming from a linear, one-tracked game like Doom 3 I was relieved I could avoid fighting by hiding or running away. I could even get help from the guards! And best of all, no more stupid jump-scares!

I loved everything about Oblivion, especially coming from regular FPS games and semi-RPGs like Deus Ex. You could buy and sell in real shops, explore wherever you wanted, steal, place bets in the arena or even participate yourself! The total freedom I was offered in the world of Cyrodiil quickly made the game my number one right beside Deus (or slightly above). Not to mention the serenity and calmness brought forth by the beautiful forests and incredible music

what did you edit ? Just interested

question : how far along did you create lorthan ?

Spelling mistakes


What do you mean?

Well , was he your very first character ? or was he a dozen along ? or maybe you made him a few years after purchasing OB

any other charcters you remember before lorthan ?

Lothran is my one and only ever Oblivion character. I haven´t even made a "practice character" many people do to figure out how the game works. I created Lothran and we have explored Cyrodiil together since Feb 2007

well WAM BAM !

are you serious! :0 not ONE OTHER?

but...dont you ...dont you think about playing other races ? females ? other types of people

does that mean you havnt done all of the guilds ?

that is...mind blowing for me....now days i settle with chars because i have played OB so much now...but your very first?

you are a very special person!

Nope


I have indeed been tempted, but I just can´t leave Lothran like that. It´s not hard for me though to stick with him only. We´ve been through so much together and I think about our history every time I play


I´ve tried all except DB, but I haven´t finished any guild questline unless you count the arena. That´s not a guild though..


Many people say that to me. Not all in a warm way though

Thank you

[quote name='flowerboom' post='151600' date='Feb 9 2013, 09:41 PM']
you are a very special person!
[/quote]
Many people say that to me. Not all in a warm way though

Thank you
[/quote]


no problem

Often , people forget that there is a person behind lorthan , they go to default setting : hows lorthan today ?

I never forget that somebody is behind his amazing creation.

Oh, I don´t know if he´s so amazing, but he is my buddy!

If you ask me, Buffy, Baa and decrepit´s avatar are more amazing. They actually go out and do stuff!

nice brush off

Although i do have a lot of appreciation for what you have managed , very few people can say that , its a real achivement!

But i still appreciate you rather than lorthan...just saying....

I´m so humble, ain´t I?


Thank you! I really appreciate that

With Morrowind I was instantly dragged in by the foreign world and the interesting architecture. The uniqueness of the creatures and the ridiculously large world to explore kept me playing for hours on end. The storyline, guilds, and scope of the world was like nothing I'd ever seen in a game before. I think that Morrowind is probably the only game I ever played every chance I could literally for years. Now I can't play it. I've done everything over and over again so many times that when I get a quest I know exactly what to do and where to go. I still plug it in once in a while to reminisce but don't play for more than an hour anymore. I basically just explore the world and think back. It is as if I just stepped back into my childhood for a few minutes every time I hear the theme song though.

Oblivion's experience was bittersweet for me. It was a huge letdown from what I'd hoped it would be and what we'd been told it would be...at least one administrator here shared my opinion. I was part of the generation that had been sucked in by the hype machine with promises of amazingly intelligent NPC's and a unique world. When I first picked up the game I was amazed with the graphics and the game itself. Then the AI proved to be disappointing, with characters sharing news with their wife like they'd never met and never really doing anything like what had been shown by the devs. The creatures were all bland and generic like they'd been pulled straight from an old book of fairy tale creatures.

I still enjoyed Oblivion and ended up dumping quite a few hours into it but it wasn't like Morrowind, I was never really completely drawn in by it. The only thing about Oblivion that I fell head first into was the Shivering Isles expansion, which I felt was alien enough that I just had to explore it fully. It brought back that unique feeling of Morrowind more than Vanilla Oblivion ever did.

flowerboom: don't even bother, I've already tried to get mirocu to create a second character. Aint gonna happen...I was close, though, wasn't I?



I laughed so hard at this, it seriously started to hurt!



Oblivion was probably my 15th or 20th RPG or "RPG". Most "RPGs" are terrible PS or PS2 copycat games, like Drakkengard or Crusaders of Might and Magic.



I agree. One of the things I loved early on was how long it took to walk (let's say) from Bruma to Leyawiin. HOURS. And I've never been a runner, I've always walked more than I've run.

I remember just after getting Oblivion, I was a member of IGN's forums and I was commenting on how long it took to get from one place to another. And some other forumite was like "UM .... u know u can fast-travel, rite?" I had no idea what FT was at the time, and once I learned, I still never used it.

The first things I've felt about Oblivion: I was blown away. Just amazed. Unlike Kiln up above, I had no preconceptions about what to expect, and maybe that's a good thing.

I've told this story before many times over at Beth's forums, but never here.

I was bored one night: a recovering drug addict who had been into some rather heavy compassion. Those of us in 'recovery' need to keep our minds occupied; that's one of the ways we stay clean. Anyways, I'm bored, and I was also bored of all my PS and PS2 games at the time, so I started thinking about the "next gen" system.

...This was back in October 2008; I think the PS3 had only been out for a year. I said to myself that if the PS3 has any decent games (RPG-type games with adventure and magic and hand-weapons, like all the classics I grew up with) I'm gonna buy a PS3. One of the best things about quitting drugs is I had all this money saved all the sudden.

I went online to www.gamerevolution.com which is a site I've used in the past. I literally went thru the whole alphabet, reading reviews on various games at the time. I started with the letter A. Assassin's Creed was not out on PS3 (I don't think) at the time, and maybe that's a good thing, so I moved on to the letter B.

B...C...D....E...F....G...H...I....J...K..L....M....N...O....P....Q...R....S....

....NOTHING....nothing for any of those letters (not back then, anyways). Then I got to the letter T.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. What a weird title! GameRevolution gave this RPG an A or an A+, and I never finished reading the review that night. About half way through, I grabbed my keys & wallet, got in my car, and DROVE as fast as I could to my nearby GameStop, BOUGHT Oblivion AND a PS3 on the spot, drove home and hooked it all up! 10:24 PM is when I started my first character.

My first character was Lady Anne. To be honest, I don't remember much about her or my first playthrough. I was so blown away by it all! ...All the RPGs and "RPGs" I had tried beforehand railroaded the PC through invisible barriers, and offered very little exploration, if any. See that pretty path going through the bushes? Well you can't walk on it....it's just there to look pretty. That sort of thing.

Well in Oblivion, I could walk on that pretty path. See where it goes. That blew me away just as much as seeing Cyrodiil's atmosphere for the first time!

After Lady Anne delivered the Amulet, I totally scrapped her game. I started all over again with a brand-new character (whose name i've forgotten). I enjoyed that entire process so much (meeting the Emperor, leaving the Sewers, etc.) I started all over again, basically.

Phew.....

Thanks for your honestly. It is hard but worth it. Games are a great way to cope with life and take your mind off of how difficult it can sometimes be. I know the feeling. Stay strong.

I had the same experience when I came to Morrowind from Oblivion


No


It definitely is. I literally had no idea what Oblivion or TES was when I was handed it as a thank you for driving a couple of buddies home from a party the day after. I thought it was an overhead view with gameplay like Civilization or something. When I discovered it was a first person RPG I was so happy I almost took a dive into my monitor as I wanted to physically be in that world!

Again you trust astonished me renee ( look im going to call you renee get over it) its actually really nice to see how oblivion has literally changed your life , its just amazing what the elder scrolls can do isint it ?

i dont know anything about drugs , again like with beggars i cant comment but you seem to of done really well for yourself , COOKIES!

well i feel like old miro , with BOTH skyirm and morrowind

with skyrim i was just dissapointed basically , the game felt so much smaller then oblivivon, the idea of stand-alone quests ( the epic glue that held cyrodill togther) was dead , the guiliens had fewer quests than previous , there were fewer spells to learn , there was less land to explore , there were less skills to learn...everythign was just LESS .....

with morrowind , the highest praise i can give , and its high is this : i can see why people think it was the best game ever created , when i first played i felt the epicness , i loved the towns , the music , the creatrues..the sheer amount of things to do was overwhelming

but , the world had no map icons so i didnt have a clue were i was going , the world has NO AI ( almost) which completly killed the games immersion . the combat was bad , creatures were annoying , and the quesltines i gave up on because they were TOO LONG

literally i did like 50 quesst for fg and eventually gave up because time after time i got a fetch quest to head to "the most northern of the isles) when i was in balamors



i honestly think that your favourite ES game is your first , because you get something unique , something raw , from that which you can never have again

This is what I have been preaching for years over at Bethsoft

Ha ha you've told this story before and it still amazes me!

I've probably asked this before but did those buddies give you Oblivion and say something like "heh, this game is kinda cool, you can have it." Or were they more like "this is the BEST game in the world, and you can have it!"



It's amazing and true: a videogame really did change my life for the better.




I disagree. I like Skyrim and Oblivion equally, yet OB was my first. Both have flaws and both have better points, and that's just how it is with me. *shrugs*

Skyrim's questlines are shorter (true) but I still enjoy the writing of them. Skyrim is "dumbed down" in lots of ways, but so was Oblivion (in comparison to Morrowind) and what too many people do is they ignore Skyrim's better potentials. Yeah, it's dumbed-down, but there are also plenty of areas where it's not, or where it's got new features.

The wilderness is better-fleshed with peaceful creatures, for instance, which is something I've wanted in Cyrodiil for a long time. I like seeing bunnies and foxes hawks and goats, not just deer. This makes the wilderness more believable to me. Fish in the streams, birds in the air. I like watching butterfiles, moths, and dragoflies flit around one another as my character walks by. ... I can also make a charcter who has a mundane job, and he or she make money this way if they want to without me having to "RP" it. Not all characters have to adventure/spam potions for sale, now we can make money chopping wood! Or mining ores! Or farming!

Skyrim has a better system (in my opinion) of leveling too; I much prefer the static leveling system over Oblivion's dynamic (everyone levels with you) system. I like the fact that some areas are too dangerous to go into, and some are easier. It invites new methods of strategy. Enemies in Skyrim also won't just chase you to the far points of the globe if they see you. Wolves, bears, bandits (etc.) usually give us a chance to keep off their turf before they attack. I get sick of being chased by multiple wolves in Oblivion/Cyrodiil! I'm glad Beth changed this.

I could go on but you get the point, I hope. Maybe if I had access to mods in one game (but not the other) I would prefer one over the other, but if they're both vanilla? I like 'em both about equally. And for a variety of reasons.

I know! If I hadn´t done that, I wouldn´t be here right now!


The former. He said he was done with it (I guess he meant the MQ) and he actually offered me a choice for two games. Oblivion was one that I took, and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines was the other. I say it was two for two!

Oh, so he beat the game, huh?

Glad you took Oblivion over Bloodlines. I wonder if Assassin's Creed was out back then if I would have bought it instead of Oblivion. I don't own AC to this day, but my nephew does and it is the type of game that I potentially could get into. But I'm glad I got 'stuck' with Elder Scrolls.

:biggrin:

[/quote]

Oh, so he beat the game, huh?

Glad you took Oblivion over Bloodlines. I wonder if Assassin's Creed was out back then if I would have bought it instead of Oblivion. I don't own AC to this day, but my nephew does and it is the type of game that I potentially could get into. But I'm glad I got 'stuck' with Elder Scrolls.

:biggrin:
[/quote]


yes i dont tend to buy computer games anymore because tes just fills the void for me

the opening scene , This is the year of akatosh 433 , the closing days of the 3rd era , and the final hours of my life. - EPIC !!

Every time i make a new character i watch it , it fills me with such passion , such insipartion that it just fills my head with thoughts about a new character , mirocu even if you dont intend to make a new character you need to watch that opening scene again.

It ... it is so all- inspiring .... THANK YOU DEVS

Me too! I seriously had no idea what the game was really about, but I´m so glad I decided to help those guys get home!


Same here. If I play another game besides Morrowind or Oblivion, it feels like I´m cheating on my girlfriend or something!

[/quote]
Same here. If I play another game besides Morrowind or Oblivion, it feels like I´m cheating on my girlfriend or something!
[/quote]



*smashes glass*

WHAT?!

i thought i was the only one in your life

In my case, I've been waiting for a game like Elder Scrolls since the mid 1980s. Ever since playing Adventure on the Atari 2600. <-That's a video link. Watch a few seconds or minutes of that video. THAT is one of the videogame "RPGs" we had to play when I was a kid. That's what we had on console. From what I understand, PC games back then were either entirely text-based, or offered similarly simple graphics.



So ever since then I have been waiting for a 3D game with lots of exploration, a game like TES IV: Oblivion. So that's roughly 28 years of waiting!

Thank you. *sits down, with coffee*

Wow, just look at the colors! The lush forest! The lifelike towns!

Lol. we had to have a LOOOOOT of imagination back then!

... yup they sure dont make like they did in the 80's ! ( i wasnt born )

suprised they didnt feature MT in there at some point.

When I first played Morrowind I didn't want to stop, I played it on the Xbox the first time.

The open world was just so unlike anything I'd ever seen in a console game. Those types of games just didn't exist in such great detail for console gamers, maybe not for PC players either. Morrowind was something really unique and that is what dragged me back to it so many times.

When I look back on the first time I played it, I was at a friend's house and acted like a total dirt bag by tying up his Xbox with a single player game for several hours. I felt guilty but then he fell asleep and I played MW all night until the sun came up.

As soon as I got an Xbox I grabbed MW and played it constantly. When they released the GOTY edition with the expansions I was sucked back in again. I just never get the same feeling with current games. Oblivion and Skyrim were fun but never felt the same.

Personally I think that it is because both Oblivion and Skyrim are too generic. There's just not enough originality in these current games. The landscape, architecture, creatures, and people aren't distinct enough in the last two installments IMO.

I am pretty sure I saw Morrowind at a friend's house in the early millenium. I was at some party in 2002 or '03, and the Xbox (the original one) was still relatively new. Anyways, I remember being awed by this game, whatever it was. I remember there was a lot of fog or mist in the air, and it had a fantasy theme to it. And it seemed to go on and on forever.

But back then I did not have an Xbox, and my memory is terrible; if somebody told me "this game is called The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind" I would not remember that sort of a name (too weird!) unless I wrote it down. But I probably asked the guy playing the game what its name is, and since TES: III was not on Playstation, my luck ran out.

So that's one thing to think about. Assuming I had an Xbox back then instead of a Playstation, chances are I would have discovered Elder Scrolls years before 2008.

This is a great story, Saga (or is it Renee? Which do you prefer?)! Thank you for sharing it with us.

Like Kiln I started with Morrowind. I too was drawn in by the openness and the alien quality of the world. I spent hours doing nothing but roaming. I saw houses inside of mushrooms, cities built almost entirely underground to cope with the ash storms, and Vivec’s cantons with the floating Ministry of Truth. The Ghostfence was this incredibly majestic and intimidating thing to me for the longest time.

But even more than that was the fact that this world had a long and vibrant history to it. Too many times in RPGs it seems like the world is just thrown in as a stage for all the magic and sword-play. How often do we hear:



The smartest thing that I believe the developers did in this series was to include all of the in-game reading material. The books gave Tamriel a palpable history that could be quantified. You could read about a particular Dwarven stronghold, then pack up and go visit that stronghold. That just blew me away!

I remember the guard that recommended that I take the Silt Strider the first time I left Seyda Neen. I had no idea what the hell a ‘Silt Strider’ was. I didn’t find out that it was the gigantic insect parked outside the city until I hit Balmora. Once in Balmora I had a job to do... find some guy named Caius Cosades. The game didn’t hold your hand and tell you how to do this, it was up to you. That really made me feel like a stranger in this world, which is exactly what I was supposed to be. I wandered around until I found the South Wall Corner Club where a helpful proprietor steered me towards Cosades house. Inside I was greeted by a shirtless, balding wreck of a man with a crack pipe laying under the bed (It wasn’t until later that later learned about skooma). This guy turned out to be the Grandmaster of the Blades in Vvardenfell! Needless to say, I was even more hooked!

It doesn’t matter if you have an interesting world filled with unique architecture and fauna, if there aren’t great characters inhabiting this world things will still get old fast. That is where I believe that Morrowind succeeds over the other entries in the franchise. In addition to Caius, you also had Sugar-Lips Habasi, Aengoth the Jeweler, Persius Mercius, Big Helende, Gentleman Jim Stacy and Crazy Legs Aratamo, Master Aryon, Mistress Therana, Divayth Fyr, and Balades Demnevanni. Not to mention the likes of Mehra Milo, Nibani Maesa, and Sul Matuul . And who can forget the first time they met Uncle Crassius?!


I think there's a lot of truth to this.

Thanks Destri, and I suppose Renee is fine. Renee is my real first name. I only call myself Lady Saga here because I like telling stories...."sagas" if you will.

Your story is great, too. I have yet to try Morrowind. I really wish I had an Xbox back in the early 2000s. If so, I'm sure I'd be a TES veteran with 20,000+ posts on the forums, just like some of you folks.

What!? It´s not just your Bethsoft name??


You´ve posted quite alot Renee, so you´re still a veteran (I´m gonna call you Renee here too if that´s ok).

And I think you should try out Morrowind and see what you think. Even if you don´t like it, you´ve still tried it and are entitled to an opinion

Oh I'm sure I will like it. I just haven't got the time for it nowadays. ya know.....there's Kahreem and Saga (and all the writing that goes along with each story), and there's Oblivion RP character ideas I haven't even implemented yet. And I'm still very involved with Skyrim: I've got two characters extant and active in that game.

There's real-life. Factor in all these, and it leaves me no time for TES: III. Which kinda sucks. I wish I had been active with Morrowind throughout the early new millenium, instead of some of the crap I slogged thru on the Playstation and PS2.

Yeah you really missed out. Although you could grab it cheap for PC and then use some of the graphic update mods to make it look better than it ever was back then.

Oh I don't care about graphics or looks. Actually it might be refreshing if I ever go back and see how it was back then, just pure vanilla. No graphic mods at all. I've seen a couple games that were made years ago that have had an "HD" version made for modern times; I always wind up liking the original better.

If there's a mod for making combat a little more realistic, I might wanna grab that one (assuming I ever get a gaming PC). I have heard that the animation shows weapons going right into the enemy, yet sometimes the game calls it a 'miss'. That would bug me. But graphics? I'd want the original graphics! Sign me up.

One graphic mod is imvho essential. Unless of course you are pursuing the vanilla feel or some crap like that
Better Bodies is also highly recommended. These mods doesn´t take away the Morrowind feel in any way, really. They just make it look as it should have looked back then. The worst clunkiness is edged down, not out and the worst seams are blended in.

Yeah, the combat system. It checks your character´s current stats against the weapon skill needed to hit which decides whether you hit or not. Also, fatigue is very important if you want to hit that pesky mudcrab All in all it´s like those tabletop games you are familiar with, Renee.

Progress slow, enjoy Seyda Neen and you´ll be fine

There isn't major level scaling in Morrowind so you won't be able to automatically conquer everything in your path at the very start. It is a very different game from basically everything Bethsoft has created since because of this.

As Mirocu explained, the weapons going through targets indictates a miss that was dictated by a lack of skill with the weapon of choice. If you're skilled with short blades but using an axe, you'll miss constantly. It takes some getting used to unless you want to mod the game.

You can train these skills with trainers indefinitely and there isn't a cap of how many times you can train per level in Morrowind as long as you've got the gold.

All in all the landscape is varied and always interesting. One minute you're in a lush green valley and over the mountain into the next region you're in lava filled badlands. The weather is also different between regions with some having rain and some having sandstorms.

Morrowind is great if you can look past the graphics and appreciate a game where skills are an important part of everything. It is also very deep.

Here's what may put you off though and it hardly gets mentioned because lots of Morrowind players don't think about it:

Aside from general stationary NPC dialogue, it is all text based. When you talk to somebody you'll get a menu of topics to select from with some unique and some generic responses to the questions. The whole system is text based. It works very well but the lines aren't voice acted. The barter system is like in Fallout where you can put up a bunch of items and then sell all at once instead of going through mini transactions.

That’s one of the first things I remember about Morrowind. When I got to the text conversation options I was just floored. The NPCs had so much to say! For a while I walked my character around and just talked to people. (Then she died rapidly many times in a row. Some bandit cave? Yeah.)

With Morrowind the impression I remember the most is walking out of the boat and hearing the silt strider. It was such a magical world I almost forgot to breathe. I had played Oblivion quite a bit by then and I loved it, but Cyrodiil always felt like a beautiful place with magical creatures. Morrowind was magic.

I actually find all the text dialogue immersion breaking, just like with the static trees. I don´t mind it, but it doesn´t do it for me either. If I am to believe the world I need the trees to move in the wind and the people to talk. Just how I roll

Personally, I prefer the text dialogue to the voice work that Bethesda gives us. In Morrowind the voice work seemed to have more impact ("We're watching you... scum") than it does now. Instead of shelling out for high priced voice talent (Patrick Stewart, Terrence Stamp, Joan Allen, Max Von Sydow) how about you just hire more voice actors? One actor should not be the voice of every single character of a certain race within the game! Especially if that voice actor just doesn't fit the race they are supposed to represent. Really Bethesda? Cockney accents for the Dark Elves? And why do all the Redguards in Skyrim sound like whiny high school sophomores?

See, that's one of the things that irritates me also about the games. I didn't even play Morrowind beyond ten minutes, but in Oblivion I got REALLY tired of hearing the same 8 actors and actresses voicing the races.

And in Skyrim... some of the women made me want to gouge my ears out XD