Let's be clear: Morrowind has absolutely dated graphics and animations. There’s no voiced dialogue, no quest markers, no responsive AIs, and fast travel is limited at best. Does that make it a pain to play today? Perhaps. It's a world remarkably alien and bizarre compared to classic fantasy RPG concepts.

Yet this exact world feels so real, so alive, and tells a main storyline less epic than none. A game that opens with a dream and hands you a passport to an enchanted, uncaring, and unapologetically dense world. It sucks you into it, forcing you to read, think, and explore—to actually become part of this world—in order to progress. It asks you not to conquer it, but to understand it.

The spirit of TES always went beyond mechanics and graphics—it was about the world speaking back to you in whispers. But the names that once gave it that soul—MK, Ken, Jeremy Soule, and now Kurt—are gone. Under the Xbox acquisition, I don't know if BGS can still find the experimental spirit and layered worldbuilding they once had, rather than going for mass-market appeal. Now, there is a community that remembers, and there are indie developers carrying the flames. But to make a big open-world game this vast and complex, I can only imagine the compromises a small studio would be forced to make.

VI might still surprise us—and I hope it does. But right now, I feel that a spiritual successor to Morrowind may never come from Bethesda. It might come from someone who loved it as much as we do, somewhere else.

But, nonetheless, I'm afraid I find it all very, very sad that it should end this way, something that began in such glory and noble promise.

—Vivec