I won't dispute that Morrowind's character creation process can be tedious (despite the fact that many Daggerfall fans felt that DF's even longer and more complex character creation was a highlight of the game), and that the pre-made classes are garbage, but in the long run, your initial choices don't make that much of a difference. Unlike OB (or SR, from what I read), you aren't under constant pressure from the levelling and scaling to "beat the levelling curve". You can buy training, if you feel that you're too poor at something to self-train. If you want, you can tackle the game at your leisure, or wait until you're better prepared; Cais Cosades even recommends it, and he's "important". The first 3-7 levels are generally a struggle (which can easily take the entire 20-30 hours that the OP played), after which I reach the "good enough to fight the big fights, but not always win" stage, then eventually the character hits the "too good, no challenge, time to restart" self-limit, which the Expansions delay for quite some time. Combat, as has been pointed out by the OP, suffers badly in MW due to the visually painful lack of a "miss" animation, but is otherwise "adequate", especially once your character gains some skill with the weapon. The control response (at least on PC) is very direct, and the amount of time that you "draw back" to strike affects the strength of the attack, so you can either "spam" the button for a flurry of weak hits (ideal for delivering enchantment damage) or hold long enough to deliver full power for the weapon (more likely to stagger or knock down the opponent, especially if you use a heavy weapon). Unlike Oblivion's system, if you do manage to connect with the target, you do full rated damage for that weapon, plus a bonus for your Strength, not some nerfed scratch because of low skill. Skill affects hit probability; the weapon and your Strength determine damage. In Oblivion, it always felt like I was turning over control of the character to the computer when I pressed the attack button. Besides, combat is not the focus of the game, just one facet of the whole experience. Obviously, the OP did not get very far with the MQ in 20-30 hours, and can't make a knowledgable comment on it. Granted, you CAN get pretty far in that time (in fact, you can beat the game in 5 minutes if you abuse all the exploits and bugs to the absurd limits, bypass the MQ, and just go straight in for the "kill"), but you won't see anything along the way, have time to read the dialog, or othewise have any chance of understanding what's going on around you. The biggest single difference between the earlier games (DF and MW) versus the later (OB and SR) is that the earlier ones were highly dependent on the character's skills, whereas the later are far more reliant on the player's skills. In DF and MW, you can fail at spellcasting, potionmaking, enchanting, or repairs if your skills are low, and in fact will do so frequently throughout the game. In OB and SR, the very possibility of failure in almost everythng has been removed to make it "more accessible". In that respect, the old games are "hardcoe", where you struggle to gain competence and eventually mastery, while the newer ones are more heavily oriented toward getting you to the next combat as quickly as you like. The games are written for distinct but somewhat overlapping markets (many people like both, but some vehmently prefer one or the other), and a direct comparison is almost like comparing Chess to Tetris. If you like one or the other, who's to tell you you're wrong; if you like both, then congratulatons. [ Edit: As Siant_juib points out, MW actually had the smallest game world. The "playable area", however, was comparable to or greater than Oblivion's, because the boundaries of the OB map weren't player-reachable, and many areas were unscalable or closed off. Morrowind's Levitation allowed you to access nearly 100% of the map, and there were actually a number of things to be found by "going 3D"; the realization shocked me at the time, when I noticed how some content had been placed "just in case" somebody ever managed to get to some hidden nook or cranny high up on a ledge or mountaintop. The excessive use of levelling and scaling meant that much of OB's content was "redundant", since there was never anything to find except the same random garbage as everywhere else; it make exploring more than a fraction of that huge map pointless. In contrast, I'm STILL finding new and unique items that I never found before in Morrowind, after over 5 years of frequent playing. ]

Lol. It's alright of course if he dislikes MW. It's not his cup of tea. I hope Skyrim or Oblivion last as long as MW. 10 years and counting.

There is no such thing as "gimping" your character. Beyond the time it takes to learn the game (During which time you can't blame the game for how characters turn out unless its something that wasn't intentionally put there thats causing the issue) any state your character ends up in is of your own choice. If you sit and level Speechcraft all day and then decide you want to go fight some giants, don't come complaining when you suddenly can't take back the time you just spent doing something worthless towards combat. And that goes vice versa.

And you were never restricted to just your class in Morrowind nor even Oblivion. You could easily become a mage on the side if you picked/created a melee class. The only restriction was that you couldn't level up doing that, but the thing is due to how those games worked and what was available to you, you didn't need to level up when you did that unless you specifically wanted higher level loot or needed to be a higher level or anything like that. And in those cases you're brand new skills in magic could be used to further facilitate you training your combat skills so that they don't detract from what you decided to do.

Now sure you could end up as a master of all trades, but heres the thing: no one is forcing you to just play on one character, and truly these are not one character games. Using multiple characters for different playstyles was the best way to avoid this in the past games and ultimately helped out a lot when you were just learning how the game worked. And while you could say "but I like having one character", I could also say just remake him in another save, but give him a different personality/playstyle this time. I've done that, where three iterations of the same base character took the three separate paths of the warrior, mage, and thief. And if you want to have one character to one save, then you have no reason nor right to complain if you sit there and make him into a master of all trades. If you don't want that, don't do it.

There were always ways to remain a pure warrior, a pure mage, or a pure stealth character without having to dip into the other two's skill sets. Mages and stealth characters have their own ways of dealing with damage (magic by mitigating it completely either through reflection, healing, or outright preventing the opponent from being able to inflict damage; stealth characters by completely avoiding it altogether regardless of where it comes from) and as such you never have to dip into the warrior skillset just to raise health, as you don't need copious amounts of health as a mage or a stealth character, and even if you wanted it, there were better ways then breaking the pure path.

Morrowind was the only TES game that I eneded up shelving after 20 hours or so of play time. I found it overly tedious, uncomprimising on initial character generations choices, and it felt more like a Skill Grinding game then a RP game to me.

All the other TES games I liked, each for different reasons. Though i also Shelved Oblivion until the expansions came out, because of issues with it pre-expansion.

Your whole opinion might changed if you played an extra 80+ hours of morrowind. Everyone knows the storys in oblivion and skyrim were in a way weaker than morrowinds. The reason for this is that morrowinds story had a lot of backbone and was stable with deep lore and emersion. Oblivion and skyrims was just a go here, do this, kinda thing.

Well Scow, that's an improvement, but you're still exaggerating the Sneak, Speech, and Enchant. Speech was always one of the easier skills to raise for me, Sneak was always difficult, but slightly more realistic, I just had to map my area out a bit. Enchant is a pain in the ass, but it's not overly difficult to level. I think you've been spoiled by the speedy leveling of Oblivion and Skyrim because those things do not level that slow.

FailedtoOpen, I agree that it's a pain in the ass with the whole people knocking you down, the paralysis (Which actually usually only lasts a little bit because of the small amount of charge paralysis gets), and Yes, the Greater Bonewalkers are a pain, but to counter, I usually carried Stamina Potions and Recover Strength Potions, or more likely, I had Stamina regenerating Armor and used Spells to restorr my Stamina/Strength. Restoration is a Gem of a skill.

Your whole opinion might changed if you played an extra 80+ hours of morrowind. Everyone knows the storys in oblivion and skyrim were in a way weaker than morrowinds. The reason for this is that morrowinds story had a lot of backbone and was stable with deep lore and emersion. Oblivion and skyrims was just a go here, do this, kinda thing.

Personally, I think that Oblivion got the basic function of Speechcraft down the best...

One important thing, is to point out how ridiculously unbalanced some parts of Morrowind were. Alchemy, more than anything. If you want, you can effectively make it tens of thousands of times as powerful as anything and everything else in the game.

I like the balancing for Alchemy in the later games, because you cant use it to increase your strenght by 55,000 for 19 Months.

Really?

I think http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAHBMj2N5Qs does a fair job of showing just how absurd Speechcraft was in Oblivion.

True, as someone else stated there is room for error in both games. I think why I find Skyrim more lenient is because it focuses more on skill than stats. You can win a battle based upon your real skill more than your stats. I haven't felt that in Morrowind yet. Morrowind feels like I am much more dependent on my skills and attributes while Skyrim feels like the perks I select only enhance my ability in combat. But I digress... there is room for error in both I just feel like in Skyrim your error can be overridden by your own skill, although I'd argue Skyrim doesn't require much combat skill.

As for the rest, Skyrim does have a similar trial and error piece. When I first started my character was a blob of random perks, needless to say I restarted. That's not a problem, I expect that with any game I try for the first time. Morrowind is different in that you could spend hours going through the world only to be held back, or limited by one mistake.

Wait, I don't understand this post. Skyrim is an RPG. Shouldn't your real life skills be completely irrelevant? It wouldn't make sense for a character with an extremely low Long Blade skill to be able to kill, say, an experienced soldier of the Imperial Legion. Allowing that to happen because the player is good at mashing buttons renders the skill useless and takes away from the RPG aspect of the game.

In Morrowind, you could start out as a warrior, decide to be a thief, and later become a mage -- and you'd be no worse off than if you had started as a pure mage.
In Skyrim, you could start out as a warrior, decide to be a thief, and later become a mage.. but you would have invested nearly all your perk points into warrior skills. You would end up being a horrible mage because perks are more important than skills in Skyrim, and you didn't have very many points to invest in mage skills. There is no versatility to be had unless you plan for it, and even then you'd be gimped. Sure, that adds a greater sense of balance, but there's no such thing as balance when it comes to skill. In real life, you aren't limited in what you can do because you happened to learn too much of one thing. An acrobat can become a martial artist can become a scientist can become an astronaut. Shouldn't the same hold true for games that are trying to achieve the same sense of character progression?

And removing player skill entirely takes away from the GAME part of the RPG.

In Skyrim, you continue gaining perks as long as you're gaining skills. In real life, someone who waited until they were 50 before taking up a new skill would not be as good in that field as someone who's been raised from birth to handle that task. The games just have VERY compressed learning curves.

There's no learning curve in Skyrim. There's a learning limit. Since perks now handle all important aspects of skills, simply being able to get every skill to 100 doesn't mean anything. Things that should have been tied in with your knowledge of a skill were instead made into perks that you have to buy with experience -- experience that has a cap and is non-refundable.

And the only way to really fix that would be to uncap Skill Levels.

There's a learning limit in every TES game.

Wait, I don't understand this post. Skyrim is an RPG. Shouldn't your real life skills be completely irrelevant? It wouldn't make sense for a character with an extremely low Long Blade skill to be able to kill, say, an experienced soldier of the Imperial Legion. Allowing that to happen because the player is good at mashing buttons renders the skill useless and takes away from the RPG aspect of the game.

That's not true at all.

In Morrowind, you could start out as a warrior, decide to be a thief, and later become a mage -- and you'd be no worse off than if you had started as a pure mage.
In Skyrim, you could start out as a warrior, decide to be a thief, and later become a mage.. but you would have invested nearly all your perk points into warrior skills. You would end up being a horrible mage because perks are more important than skills in Skyrim, and you didn't have very many points to invest in mage skills. There is no versatility to be had unless you plan for it, and even then you'd be gimped. Sure, that adds a greater sense of balance, but there's no such thing as balance when it comes to skill. In real life, you aren't limited in what you can do because you happened to learn too much of one thing. An acrobat can become a martial artist can become a scientist can become an astronaut. Shouldn't the same hold true for games that are trying to achieve the same sense of character progression?