Holy slavery this game slaps harder than a khajiit on skooma

What a grand and intoxicating experience. The moment the Oblivion Remaster was announced I knew I had no choice but to finally replay ... Morrowind, my first Elder Scrolls game. I would have gone back to Arena but every time I get out of the starter dungeon--whether emulated or on my MS-DOS machine--the game crashes so yeah I think Morrowind is a safe place for modern gamers to start in revisiting the Elder Scrolls anyway (what is Daggerfall???). It largely plays like a modern FPS/RPG because it helped usher in that era of game in the first place, another aspect that helps make it an easy recommendation no matter how many years have passed. And its worldbuilding, narrative, and even gameplay are unrelentingly enjoyable as long as you are prepared to take some notes and stick with it.

It is a Bethesda game so character creation is some of the most enjoyable around, even if they probably only perfected it with Oblivion. The process is extremely brief but immediately helps you feel invested in the larger world and gives you a hint of your place in it, and fleshing out the choices you make in the beginning--or of course totally abandoning them for a life of crime and leaping over mountains--provides some of the most enjoyable experiences you will have in this or any other game. There are eight million things to do and eight billion ways to do them and it is basically impossible to feel limited, and that is really what I am looking for in my open-world games. I am not going to say that combat is the best feature of the game, and Bethesda definitely had not yet figured out how to balance human reflexes against character skills just yet, but again if you make sure to begin by leaning into whatever combat type your character is actually good at, you will get the hang of it.

It is true for the most part what they say about Bloodmoon and Tribunal--they each have enemies in them that are so much harder than anything you encounter in the base game, including the final encounter, that it makes you wonder what the designers were thinking not at least retroactively raising the difficulty of the main game in response lest they realize they had made a world where "goblins in a sewer" were some of the deadliest creatures around. BUT the cool thing is that both games had genuinely awesome storylines of their own, including some Elder Scrolls-wide plot updates (that I never knew since I beat Morrowind the first time before the expansions came out and never touched it again until 2025) that are well worth experiencing first-hand. Tribunal in particular really hits hard with its dramatic and almost perverse twists on the main storyline, and for both you really feel like you have accomplished something when you wrap them up.

There is no justification to not at least give Morrowind a shot, especially now that we have entered the era of the literally automated modding process. I finally tried my hand at getting hundreds of mods to work together and failed spectacularly, so I gave up and used OpenMW's automatic installation to get the visual fidelity stuff working effortlessly and dove back in. I am sure Tamriel Reborn in particular is exciting for people who want even more areas to explore--yeah I am definitely not one of them since even going nuts and trying to visit places I never saw before I still probably only set foot in 50% of the locations in the actual game, let alone the hundreds or thousands more added by the insanely dedicated modding world keeping this game relevant for decades.

After getting stuck in Balmora on every single attempt over the years, I finally finished Bloodmoon.
160 hours+ on the clock, played through OpenMW.

Now I finally understand what makes this game so unique: the writing, the worldbuilding, and the sheer depth of the setting. It's a living archive of lore, cultures, and philosophies.

Of course, graphics mods are more than welcome on a 23-year-old game... (i will not list it)
But what really helped me go beyond Balmora and enter the rabbit hole were these 3 essential mods:

Run Faster!
The default movement speed is painfully slow (and drains fatigue on top of it). This mod alone gave me the motivation to truly explore every corner of Vvardenfell.

Better Balanced Combat
No more swinging wildly and missing everything. Early-game combat used to be infuriating. This mod makes fights feel much more fair and responsive, especially early on.

Kezyma's Voices of Vvardenfell (AI)
This one might surprise you, but it massively improved immersion for me.
The AI-generated voices may be imperfect, but they fit the tone of the characters surprisingly well. I love reading in games (Baldur's 1/2 ,Planescape, etc) But in Morrowind, for me, the voice mod makes conversations feel really more modern.
That said, this mod doesn't touch the actual lore or books. And don’t worry Morrowind still has tons of books, scrolls, hundreds of them. Histories, philosophies, religious texts, fiction, real stories you can get lost in.

All in all, I finally understand why Morrowind is considered one of the greatest RPGs.

Morrowind isn’t for everyone.
But if you're the kind of player who loves piecing together a story, who doesn't mind, reading apocryphal texts, or wondering what the hell a CHIM is.
This game might just possess you.
It did me.