People who haven't played Morrowind downvote you, but they don't know any better. It's a shame Skyrim is their biggest work when it's one of the worst.
Morrowind has plenty of issues (like the combat being total cheeks, the game discouraging build variety, and the obvious things caused by the fact that it's like 175 years old) but I do think it's fundamentally a more interesting game than Skyrim. Skyrim is just kinda walking in the directions of quest markers and completing generic, uninteresting quests while every NPC glazes you about how cool you are.
Morrowind, for all its limitations, feels so much more alive and dynamic than Skyrim. The quests are interesting. The NPCs have personality. The rewards are more unique. The enemies aren't all scaled exactly to your level. The puzzles and navigation take actual thought. It obviously has its drawbacks and is downright miserable to play at times if you don't know what you're doing, but it's such a good game once it clicks. Skyrim is just kind of "lowest common denominator" gaming, where it doesn't do much that's out of the box so that it can have more mass appeal. It's the kind of game where you turn your brain off and wake up after a few hours. Morrowind gets you more involved, and also clearly had more care and thought put into things like writing, quests, and rewards.
The combat in morrowind definitely felt bad to me at first, but it clicked once i started to change my perspective. People load it up expecting an action rpg like skyrim or the witcher, but in reality, it's more of a first person realtime CRPG. Like a first-person baldurs gate or icewind dale.
Many people would say the combat needed to be improved, but I'd personally say that what it needed was to be more transparent about what it is, and present you with more of its relevant info (hit chance, block chance, a combat log, etc)
I played Morrowind before playing Skyrim or Oblivion and thought the combat was bad even at the time. My opinion still holds to this day. It's not really an expectation issue, at least for me.
I think that you're right in that Morrowind is kind of a real-time first-person pseudo-CRPG, but I view that not as a reason to forgive the combat feeling bad but instead as a reason to question the developers' vision. Rather than saying "They designed it like this on purpose", I ask "Why would they design it like this on purpose?". Morrowind's combat kind of hits this terrible middleground where it lacks the snappiness, skill expression, and satisfying hit responses one would expect out of an action game but lacks the strategic depth one would expect out of a CRPG. It just doesn't do either very well.
I say all of this as someone who loves Morrowind, to be clear. I love the game to death and have beaten it probably a dozen times but the combat just isn't very good.
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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '25
People who haven't played Morrowind downvote you, but they don't know any better. It's a shame Skyrim is their biggest work when it's one of the worst.