@scriver Nitpicking a little bit but it is possible to finish Blood on the Ice without accusing the wrong person. You still have to jump through all the hoops though, even if you found proof way before.
There's some evidence left in the game files that a lot of alternative routes were planned but almost everything was scrapped. The amount of cut content in Skyrim is mind-boggling. Oblivion might have been a rushed release but Skyrim goes way above and beyond all that. I blame 11/11/11, this supposedly "omg so epic!!!" release date that makes marketing types all giddy inside.
Little side note, been playing Morrowind A LOT recently since I've finished university but am still trying to find a full time job (as opposed to my current part time job).
The story went from, "This is ok." To "OHHH THIS IS GETTING HYPE!"
As for game mechanics and game design I'm almost inclined to say Morrowind and Skyrim feel like games from two different franchises. I guess when I play Oblivion I'll find the link between them.
@Vallmyr: I'd say it's primarily streamlining that explains why Morrowind feels so different from Skyrim. Morrowind's system was incredibly complex, with vast customization options and a quirky, luck-based combat system with a bunch of unique, non-combat-oriented spell effects like Levitate. It also had almost no level scaling to speak of: once you reached a certain level, everything in the game was easy. Until then, certain enemies were absolutely crushing. It also had a vast array of exploits.
Oblivion changed that, closing various exploits from Intelligence boosting to Levitate kiting to the Soul Trap trick, which lets you give yourself unlimited stat bonuses by creating custom spells. It removed various effects outright, such as Levitate and Slowfall, and eliminated luck-based success rates, and instead made the Luck stat just grant a passive bonus to all skills.
It also streamlined the equipment system, eliminating pauldrons and greaves, using one slot for gauntlets and gloves, and making clothing and robes mutually exclusive with armor. This cut the number of equipment slots from 15 to 9. Finally, it implemented extreme level scaling, making virtually every part of the game entirely level-based and balancing the game so that a level 1 character could complete every questline with modest difficulty.
Skyrim struck a balance between Oblivion's level scaling and the flat rates of Morrowind, but it continued Oblivion's tendency towards streamlining. Bethesda removed even more spell effects as well as some skills, eliminated custom spellmaking, only allowed the player to wear one ring at a time, eliminated weapon and armor degradation, and removed all character attributes besides Health, Fatigue, and Magicka. Skyrim also replaced race-based bonuses and removed all classes.
Altogether, the games have begun much more user-friendly and much less complex. What you're experiencing is not the "dumbing down," in my opinion, but the simplification of an overly complex and wildly unbalanced system.
I would definitely recommend Oblivion. It doesn't have quite the same beauty as Skyrim or the rich texture of Morrowind, but its story is definitely the most engrossing and dramatic. There's nothing quite like marching into the blasted wastes of Oblivion and finding yourself in a world that is so profoundly hostile. It's alien and claustrophobic and oddly distressing on some subconscious level. Like stepping out into the middle of the Arctic or the Sahara, alone... and realizing that you've stumbled into a place where you were never meant to survive.
But much worse than that. Because you're not alone in Oblivion, and the inhabitants will find you. And you can see from their artwork--from everything--that you are not the first human they have tortured and killed, and you will not be the last.
Walking through those gates is truly an experience.
So far Morrowind is definitely making it somewhere on my top 10 games list but that's partially due to the three mods I'm using. The first being MGSO for the graphical updates, second being the Keynari (fox race) race mod, and the last being A Bard's Life mod. Essentially I made the Kitsune Bard guy in my profile picture and have been traveling across Vvardenfell playing songs at taverns and using bardic magic in combat.
When I play Oblivion I'll look for a fox race and bard mod as well I think. I know there's the Fennec race and Bard mod for Skyrim so when I get there I'll use those. In my trek of playing all The Elder Scrolls games I know I should probably branch out to more playstyles but personality/luck builds are my favorite and if I can play as a fox race that's my jam so definitely going to do it lol.
Edit: Oh and I am using one more mod for Morrowind, it increases run speed *slightly* as I thought the base speed was much too slow.
Morrowind did definitely not lack level scaling. Sure, the calmer areas didn't level up much, but the savage ones and the dungeons do. The Daedra places in particular, if you go there in the beginning they're just inhabited by scalps and clannfears, but once you reach the upper end of the spectrum there's nothing but dawnmaidens and golden shields or whatever those were called. Sure, it's not Oblivion level egregious where entire species go extinct as you're levelling (and there's no item scaling in MW either), but it's still there and noticeable.
While I think in general games are being dumbed down (painfully so with AAA games) I have never viewed Skyrim in this way. If he wanted to make a case of Dragon Age Origins Vs DA:2 and DA:I or mass effect series I'd agree completely. One of the major issues too is that most games are made for consoles and ported over to PC now, where as before they were made for PC then ported to consoles
Morrowind did definitely not lack level scaling. Sure, the calmer areas didn't level up much, but the savage ones and the dungeons do. The Daedra places in particular, if you go there in the beginning they're just inhabited by scalps and clannfears, but once you reach the upper end of the spectrum there's nothing but dawnmaidens and golden shields or whatever those were called. Sure, it's not Oblivion level egregious where entire species go extinct as you're levelling (and there's no item scaling in MW either), but it's still there and noticeable.
Yeah I know of the Lilmothiit, and they *MIGHT* be extinct. For the purposes of my playthroughs it's either "they are not" or my player character is like the last Dwemer where he has no idea if his people are dead or gone.
The Keynari race mod adds NPCs across the game (though few in number) so I just imagine that some Lilmothiit live in Morrowind for lore constancy.
Altogether, the games have begun much more user-friendly and much less complex. What you're experiencing is not the "dumbing down," in my opinion, but the simplification of an overly complex and wildly unbalanced system.
Some people would still consider this 'dumbing down' in the same sense that some people still prefer AD&D 2e over the 3/3.5 free for all. There's nothing wrong with liking, or appreciating, a complex system—complex for one person is not complex for everyone, as is evident with THAC0 (there's nothing particularly complex about it). :-)
That said, I don't view Skyrim or Oblivion as being dumbed down so much as lacking originality. However, that's not to say I don't enjoy them—I do, but if 20 years passed by and you asked me which game in the Elder Scrolls series I'd like to play again, the answer would be Morrowind.
Walking through those gates is truly an experience.
I thought this for the first time.
For the thirtieth time... not so much. At a certain point, closing those gates and even exploring the realm of Oblivion was a monotonous chore. Each one the same as the last.
Here are my opinions on the three 3D games. They are only opinions. But for anything I see as negative, I still enjoyed them. I also enjoyed Arena and Daggerfall.
Morrowind:
In Morrowind, you quickly learn about the Tribunal Temple, a triumvirate of sorts, but the story of how they came to be is much more interesting when looking at the main story arc later. Morrowind felt the most unique to me, both in story/lore and environment.
The thing with Morrowind, the setting of Vvardenfell, I can't compare it to much else. There are a few events one could compare with mythology, but on the whole it's quite original compared to the other games. That doesn't mean it doesn't have its own tropes (e.g. the holy trinity), but the land and the events occurring simply feel much more unique and original compared to the later games. Aside from religious persecution, it story as a whole doesn't feel like it was ripped directly from a history book.
It feels as though Bethesda are telling their own story, making their own history, rather than ripping a story directly from real history or mythology.
Oblivion:
Oblivion has... well, the world of Oblivion. A hellscape which is... somewhat generic, honestly, with a towering tower of evilness hosting an anchor for the gate. At least in terms of the other side, passing through the gates felt like the hellscape from the early Hellblazer comics from the late 80s... and... didn't really offer anything new or original.
If one could picture the Underworld, Hades, Tartarus, Hell, or whatever name one might have for it, that's basically Oblivion. It's a wasteland, there's lava, it's harsh and unforgiving (that really isn't the case, but I'm talking about the setting from the appearance side rather than actual game difficulty), even the plants are barbed/thorny and can attack you, everything wants to kill you. Even the connotation of the Oblivion gates representing the gates to the underworld.
I also thought Kvatch was a missed opportunity—apparently I wasn't the only person to feel as though Kvatch could have been rebuilt. On top of some of these missed opportunities, along came the DLC... which shortly after became a meme. I also think there was another missed opportunity with the Ayleids. They were, in my opinion, much less interesting than the disappearance of the dwemer.
Skyrim:
Skyrim, for me, having studied Norse mythology... again, it just felt too generic. If you look up images on Google for Norse Fantasy or Viking Fantasy, you'll find an abundance of images that look like they were the direct inspiration for Skyrim. Even down to the stereotypical and debunked Hollywood myth of horned helmets. Skyrim was generic not just in appearance, but also for a chunk of the secondary story happening in parallel to the main arc.
Whether it's Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas, most countries have had their fair share of uprisings and rebellions, in part of the main arc with the Stormcloaks and the Imperials—they're not telling a story that can't be found simply by looking at some historic article on Wikipedia, and, unsurprisingly, it's an uprising based on religious differences.
One could probably compare the ban on Talos worship to the banning of idols and worship imposed when Christians attempted to convert early pagans. There's also the Poetic Edda in the Bard's College and Sovngarde being almost the direct comparison to Asgard.
The dragon heralding the end of the world could be compared to Nidhogg. In addition to that, dragons and dragonslayers have, throughout history, been a part of Norse/Germanic mythology.
In a fantasy setting, this, to me, just seems dull and a little lazy. Come up with something new. Don't just open a history book or mythology book and go we'll use all of this.
From the mention of the dwemer, we see a resurgence in dwemer structures in Skyrim. I've even seen some people posting comments asking about what happened to them, and my reply would usually be "play Morrowind and you'll find out."
Skyrim, Cyrodiil, and Hammerfell all hold very little interest to me as locations (and stories, so far as Oblivion and Skyrim go). If I want to see something from the history books copy and pasted as a story into a video game, I have Age of Empires to deliver that.
Where features are concerned, I preferred the spell crafting features from the earlier games, specifically Daggerfall and Morrowind. They weren't perfect, but they did what they were supposed to. They weren't overly complex, either. The one thing I really didn't like in Skyrim was the user interface. One can tell it was designed more for consoles than for PC. That's the only part I feel was 'dumbed down.' Thankfully, there's a mod for that. Sadly, that mod is not compatible with the Special Edition.
If you've played Oblivion and Skyrim before Morrowind, then it will feel graphically and technically outdated.
I'm not sure I'd say a lot of quests can be solved in Morrowind using Speechcraft (though you can certainly gain some information via rumours and such with higher disposition), but the system received an overhaul in Oblivion (though some of the effects remained the same). I'm not sure disposition is even a thing in Skyrim. Speech in Skyrim mainly affects merchants and guards. In Oblivion and Skyrim, I would consider Speechcraft/Speech a stat to ignore, whereas it's one of the first things I tend to try and increase in Morrowind.
Like I noticed in Morrowind there's a few quests where people will ask you to do a thing or get an item for them but if you raise disposition then they waive this and you just complete the quest.
Edit: Or part of the main quest where you have to raise people's disposition to get information on where the Khajiit informant is. I loved that.
Speechcraft in Oblivion has very little use, and the minigame is easy to do (albeit rather immersion-breaking). Most quests in Oblivion are combat-oriented. Disposition is a thing in Oblivion, but the biggest impact is on store prices.
In Morrowind, disposition is really important. A lot of quests depend on getting information from people, and a lot of people won't tell you anything if they don't like you, and a LOT of people don't like you. But like in Oblivion, a Charm spell can boost disposition very high at rather low cost, though characters with low Magicka or a low Illusion skill will struggle to cast the spell successfully.
In Skyrim all speechcraft is good for is getting better rewards and prices. There might be exceptions, but I can't remember any off the top of my head.
When people discuss this topic, it's really nothing much more than wishing there was another Morrowind, though I can't say I blame them. Arena and Daggerfall are really nothing much more than procedurally generated content masking itself as a massive open-world. Oblivion and Skyrim are both very stream-lined. Morrowind was still using the basic D & D combat of die-rolls to determine what was happening in combat. It's a more "hardcore" RPG in most aspects, but it's hardly on the complexity level of many games that came before it.
Also @Vallmyr - I forgot one of the things I was going to write in my last post, which was simply that I didn't mean for that about keynari/liilmotlthueiggl to be addressed to you as the player rather than towards the mod maker. I realise that my lack of targetting made that a whole bit fuzzy
Well, finished Morrowind finally. Took 114 hours XD.
In my headcanon my Bard and Ahnassi (the Khajiit Monk you can surprisingly romance) settled down together at the inn I opened during the Bard's Life mod. The Nerevarine is awesome and I enjoyed how you BECOME the Nerevarine as opposed to being born the Nerevarine.
Going to start Oblivion soon, I know it won't be as good but here's to hoping I enjoy it n_n
Edit: The Bard mod I was using actually broke during the last dungeon and for some reason I can't use the music sheets anymore. Good thing is I finished that run so that bug won't be a problem since if I play Morrowind again I would start a new character.
Well, finished Morrowind finally. Took 114 hours XD.
In my headcanon my Bard and Ahnassi (the Khajiit Monk you can surprisingly romance) settled down together at the inn I opened during the Bard's Life mod. The Nerevarine is awesome and I enjoyed how you BECOME the Nerevarine as opposed to being born the Nerevarine.
Going to start Oblivion soon, I know it won't be as good but here's to hoping I enjoy it n_n
Edit: The Bard mod I was using actually broke during the last dungeon and for some reason I can't use the music sheets anymore. Good thing is I finished that run so that bug won't be a problem since if I play Morrowind again I would start a new character.
Hope you'll find creative ways of killing the adoring fan.
When people discuss this topic, it's really nothing much more than wishing there was another Morrowind, though I can't say I blame them. Arena and Daggerfall are really nothing much more than procedurally generated content masking itself as a massive open-world. Oblivion and Skyrim are both very stream-lined. Morrowind was still using the basic D & D combat of die-rolls to determine what was happening in combat. It's a more "hardcore" RPG in most aspects, but it's hardly on the complexity level of many games that came before it.
I Wonder what the new Morrowind expansion for TES Online is gonna bè like.
The main thing for me about Morrowind is that it probably held my attention longer than any game that's not an MMO. I bought it along with Dungeon Siege (which was fun to mod even if it wasn't a great game) and Neverwinter Nights.
Anyway, it turned out that my computer should not have been able to run Morrowind, but it did somehow. I had to do odd things to prevent save corruption and keep newly loaded saves from crashing. And I played it for about 300+ hours on one character, played through both of the expansions and was playing through lots of mods before I was done with the game.
I had a few mods that would boost high level difficulty so the game wasn't a complete cakewalk at higher level. I also didn't exploit alchemy and enchanting as much as I could have, although that was mostly because it bored the heck out of me.
For a good part of the game I flew everywhere at very high speed, thanks to the Boots of Blinding Speed. I was playing a Breton and thus had 50% magic resistance, and had a very short duration spell that would add another 50% so I could wear the boots without losing any vision.
Er, anyway. I've never been into a game like that since, although I would say that Skyrim came close - what stopped my playthrough in that was I eventually reached a point where opening any door would cause a crash, scripts weren't running properly - I had to use a console command/cheat to make the end boss on Solstheim function as intended, because otherwise I never would have completed it. Steam tells me I have 272 hours in the game. But I mean, it wasn't Morrowind, not by a long shot. I could and have played Morrowind again, but I keep getting bogged down with further attempts to play through Skyrim.
As long as future titles stay as moddable as they are now, it's not much of a concern. Fans usually find a way to bend Bethesda's shortcomings and satisfy their own needs with the help of the Creation Kit.
But it would be indeed nice if they'd return to their roots when TES:6 gets released in 2019. Like including SPEARS, which were dearly missed since Oblivion. Or a return of the MEDIUM ARMOR category. Or having permanent Birthsigns instead of switch-able Standing Stones. Or a return of major and minor skills of (custom) classes. Or the creation of your own spells ingame. Or, or, or.
Also, Daggerfall for life!
I think Daggerfall needed an ending cutscene after beating the main quest. Maybe its Just me but watching an NPC saying congratulations and then leaving your character to his own devices with nothing left to do feels weird. Also the other thing i didn't like about Daggerfall is the camera. I can't figure how to Control my character's POV with the mouse.
I think Daggerfall needed an ending cutscene after beating the main quest. Maybe its Just me but watching an NPC saying congratulations and then leaving your character to his own devices with nothing left to do feels weird. Also the other thing i didn't like about Daggerfall is the camera. I can't figure how to Control my character's POV with the mouse.
You have to go into a mode where you can use the mouse to move your POV. It's sort of a menu with arrows arranged around the screen that you have to click on to turn or move.
It's really suboptimal although I find that once I get used to it it's not so bad. I have to get used to it all over again at times because I keep starting it up every few years and have forgotten the controls.
@Vallmyr: I'd go with Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, paired with a slight decrease on the game's difficulty slider. OOO makes the game much more intense and rewards leveling instead of punishing it, as well as introducing some cool new content, but the mod also bumps up the difficulty, enough so that a new player is better off bumping the difficulty slider a little bit to the left.
Comments
There's some evidence left in the game files that a lot of alternative routes were planned but almost everything was scrapped. The amount of cut content in Skyrim is mind-boggling. Oblivion might have been a rushed release but Skyrim goes way above and beyond all that. I blame 11/11/11, this supposedly "omg so epic!!!" release date that makes marketing types all giddy inside.
The story went from, "This is ok." To "OHHH THIS IS GETTING HYPE!"
As for game mechanics and game design I'm almost inclined to say Morrowind and Skyrim feel like games from two different franchises. I guess when I play Oblivion I'll find the link between them.
Oblivion changed that, closing various exploits from Intelligence boosting to Levitate kiting to the Soul Trap trick, which lets you give yourself unlimited stat bonuses by creating custom spells. It removed various effects outright, such as Levitate and Slowfall, and eliminated luck-based success rates, and instead made the Luck stat just grant a passive bonus to all skills.
It also streamlined the equipment system, eliminating pauldrons and greaves, using one slot for gauntlets and gloves, and making clothing and robes mutually exclusive with armor. This cut the number of equipment slots from 15 to 9. Finally, it implemented extreme level scaling, making virtually every part of the game entirely level-based and balancing the game so that a level 1 character could complete every questline with modest difficulty.
Skyrim struck a balance between Oblivion's level scaling and the flat rates of Morrowind, but it continued Oblivion's tendency towards streamlining. Bethesda removed even more spell effects as well as some skills, eliminated custom spellmaking, only allowed the player to wear one ring at a time, eliminated weapon and armor degradation, and removed all character attributes besides Health, Fatigue, and Magicka. Skyrim also replaced race-based bonuses and removed all classes.
Altogether, the games have begun much more user-friendly and much less complex. What you're experiencing is not the "dumbing down," in my opinion, but the simplification of an overly complex and wildly unbalanced system.
But much worse than that. Because you're not alone in Oblivion, and the inhabitants will find you. And you can see from their artwork--from everything--that you are not the first human they have tortured and killed, and you will not be the last.
Walking through those gates is truly an experience.
So far Morrowind is definitely making it somewhere on my top 10 games list but that's partially due to the three mods I'm using. The first being MGSO for the graphical updates, second being the Keynari (fox race) race mod, and the last being A Bard's Life mod. Essentially I made the Kitsune Bard guy in my profile picture and have been traveling across Vvardenfell playing songs at taverns and using bardic magic in combat.
When I play Oblivion I'll look for a fox race and bard mod as well I think. I know there's the Fennec race and Bard mod for Skyrim so when I get there I'll use those. In my trek of playing all The Elder Scrolls games I know I should probably branch out to more playstyles but personality/luck builds are my favorite and if I can play as a fox race that's my jam so definitely going to do it lol.
Edit: Oh and I am using one more mod for Morrowind, it increases run speed *slightly* as I thought the base speed was much too slow.
...I mean they're extinct, but still...
:P
Edit: Yes I know I'm a pre-EA Bioware fanboy
The Keynari race mod adds NPCs across the game (though few in number) so I just imagine that some Lilmothiit live in Morrowind for lore constancy.
That said, I don't view Skyrim or Oblivion as being dumbed down so much as lacking originality. However, that's not to say I don't enjoy them—I do, but if 20 years passed by and you asked me which game in the Elder Scrolls series I'd like to play again, the answer would be Morrowind. I thought this for the first time.
For the thirtieth time... not so much. At a certain point, closing those gates and even exploring the realm of Oblivion was a monotonous chore. Each one the same as the last.
Here are my opinions on the three 3D games. They are only opinions. But for anything I see as negative, I still enjoyed them. I also enjoyed Arena and Daggerfall.
Morrowind:
The thing with Morrowind, the setting of Vvardenfell, I can't compare it to much else. There are a few events one could compare with mythology, but on the whole it's quite original compared to the other games. That doesn't mean it doesn't have its own tropes (e.g. the holy trinity), but the land and the events occurring simply feel much more unique and original compared to the later games. Aside from religious persecution, it story as a whole doesn't feel like it was ripped directly from a history book.
It feels as though Bethesda are telling their own story, making their own history, rather than ripping a story directly from real history or mythology.
Oblivion:
If one could picture the Underworld, Hades, Tartarus, Hell, or whatever name one might have for it, that's basically Oblivion. It's a wasteland, there's lava, it's harsh and unforgiving (that really isn't the case, but I'm talking about the setting from the appearance side rather than actual game difficulty), even the plants are barbed/thorny and can attack you, everything wants to kill you. Even the connotation of the Oblivion gates representing the gates to the underworld.
I also thought Kvatch was a missed opportunity—apparently I wasn't the only person to feel as though Kvatch could have been rebuilt. On top of some of these missed opportunities, along came the DLC... which shortly after became a meme. I also think there was another missed opportunity with the Ayleids. They were, in my opinion, much less interesting than the disappearance of the dwemer.
Skyrim:
Whether it's Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas, most countries have had their fair share of uprisings and rebellions, in part of the main arc with the Stormcloaks and the Imperials—they're not telling a story that can't be found simply by looking at some historic article on Wikipedia, and, unsurprisingly, it's an uprising based on religious differences.
One could probably compare the ban on Talos worship to the banning of idols and worship imposed when Christians attempted to convert early pagans. There's also the Poetic Edda in the Bard's College and Sovngarde being almost the direct comparison to Asgard.
The dragon heralding the end of the world could be compared to Nidhogg. In addition to that, dragons and dragonslayers have, throughout history, been a part of Norse/Germanic mythology.
In a fantasy setting, this, to me, just seems dull and a little lazy. Come up with something new. Don't just open a history book or mythology book and go we'll use all of this.
From the mention of the dwemer, we see a resurgence in dwemer structures in Skyrim. I've even seen some people posting comments asking about what happened to them, and my reply would usually be "play Morrowind and you'll find out."
Skyrim, Cyrodiil, and Hammerfell all hold very little interest to me as locations (and stories, so far as Oblivion and Skyrim go). If I want to see something from the history books copy and pasted as a story into a video game, I have Age of Empires to deliver that.
Where features are concerned, I preferred the spell crafting features from the earlier games, specifically Daggerfall and Morrowind. They weren't perfect, but they did what they were supposed to. They weren't overly complex, either. The one thing I really didn't like in Skyrim was the user interface. One can tell it was designed more for consoles than for PC. That's the only part I feel was 'dumbed down.' Thankfully, there's a mod for that. Sadly, that mod is not compatible with the Special Edition.
If you've played Oblivion and Skyrim before Morrowind, then it will feel graphically and technically outdated.
Edit: Or part of the main quest where you have to raise people's disposition to get information on where the Khajiit informant is. I loved that.
In Morrowind, disposition is really important. A lot of quests depend on getting information from people, and a lot of people won't tell you anything if they don't like you, and a LOT of people don't like you. But like in Oblivion, a Charm spell can boost disposition very high at rather low cost, though characters with low Magicka or a low Illusion skill will struggle to cast the spell successfully.
In my headcanon my Bard and Ahnassi (the Khajiit Monk you can surprisingly romance) settled down together at the inn I opened during the Bard's Life mod. The Nerevarine is awesome and I enjoyed how you BECOME the Nerevarine as opposed to being born the Nerevarine.
Going to start Oblivion soon, I know it won't be as good but here's to hoping I enjoy it n_n
Edit: The Bard mod I was using actually broke during the last dungeon and for some reason I can't use the music sheets anymore. Good thing is I finished that run so that bug won't be a problem since if I play Morrowind again I would start a new character.
Anyway, it turned out that my computer should not have been able to run Morrowind, but it did somehow. I had to do odd things to prevent save corruption and keep newly loaded saves from crashing. And I played it for about 300+ hours on one character, played through both of the expansions and was playing through lots of mods before I was done with the game.
I had a few mods that would boost high level difficulty so the game wasn't a complete cakewalk at higher level. I also didn't exploit alchemy and enchanting as much as I could have, although that was mostly because it bored the heck out of me.
For a good part of the game I flew everywhere at very high speed, thanks to the Boots of Blinding Speed. I was playing a Breton and thus had 50% magic resistance, and had a very short duration spell that would add another 50% so I could wear the boots without losing any vision.
Er, anyway. I've never been into a game like that since, although I would say that Skyrim came close - what stopped my playthrough in that was I eventually reached a point where opening any door would cause a crash, scripts weren't running properly - I had to use a console command/cheat to make the end boss on Solstheim function as intended, because otherwise I never would have completed it. Steam tells me I have 272 hours in the game. But I mean, it wasn't Morrowind, not by a long shot. I could and have played Morrowind again, but I keep getting bogged down with further attempts to play through Skyrim.
It's really suboptimal although I find that once I get used to it it's not so bad. I have to get used to it all over again at times because I keep starting it up every few years and have forgotten the controls.
@Vallmyr
I need to do that soon-ish. I might do another thread asking which mods to use so I can actually start lol