Morrowind has long been one of the best of the best. What makes it so are the setting and the freedom. I got into the franchise with Skyrim, but Morrowind is truly its pinnacle. Sad to say we are unlikely to see anything like it as long as the corporate higher-ups at Bethesda see the Skyrim model as a safer bet. Sure, Skyrim is prettier, and many people prefer its combat, but it just can't do as much, not even with mods.

Really, I think what turns most people off the combat system isn't that it's based somewhat in RNG, it's that it's based somewhat in RNG but there's no animations showing what happened, leading to ridiculous situations where people go "I stabbed that rat in the face at point blank range and missed!" rather than "It dodged again?! I guess rats are really fast..." I think the latter is enough more immersive that many people would be able to ignore it...so long as they know WHY they're missing (usually low fatigue because they're running everywhere). While there doesn't seem to be a mod to accomplish this now, when the open-source engine OpenMW hits version 1.0 and a full release, this kind of mod should be entirely possible, among a host of other options, such as natively working on Linux. (As of this review, OpenMW is on version 0.40 -- perfectly playable, but somewhat buggy and doesn't work with all mods.) There are, however, mods to make the combat like that in Skyrim and Oblivion -- I recommend the mod Oblivion-like Combat, which, as far as I know, is still only found on the official Bethesda forums.

Finding mods for Morrowind can take a bit more searching than it does for Skyrim. Skyrim mods are mostly consolidated on the Nexus, with a few exceptions. Morrowind mods on the Nexus are few and far between. Most are found on Morrowind Modding History, Great House Fliggerty, or the personal websites of the authors. MMH in particular is an archive for all the mods formerly hosted on sites like Planet Elder Scrolls and ElricM which have gone down over the years. You can find some truly impressive and interesting stuff there and the quantity swamps the Nexus, with almost four times as many mods uploaded. Between GFH, MMH, the Nexus and all the other small sites out there hosting a handful of mods, I'm pretty sure there are more Morrowind mods available for download than Skyrim, and they're capable of affecting a lot more. Much of what's hardcoded in Skyrim's engine is able to be altered in Morrowind's, and because of the way the engine processes them as well as the scripting language used, scripts are both safer to use and more versatile. Beyond that, for things that ARE hardcoded, we have external utilities like the Morrowind Code Patch to make the changes we need, in addition to the script extender and others.

The other enormous advantage Morrowind has over its sequels is its setting, which is strange, and alien, and very good at telling a story through the world itself. Morrowind is also where most of the series' interesting lore comes from. If you don't know how anyone can care about TES lore and haven't played Morrowind, that's probably why. One of their major writers for the game has written stuff that makes it look like he can't possibly be sober, and yet it somehow works. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look up Michael Kirkbride. The man is some strange variety of storytelling genius, even if he doesn't appear to be at first glance.

Other majorly good things about Morrowind include its main quest, which is probably the highest-quality out of the series (by a very long way if you're only comparing it to Skyrim, and a bit less if you also include Oblivion). There's just something special about getting dropped on Vvardenfell with not a coin to your name and no idea what you're doing or why you're there, and working your way up to godlike power so you can face down a terrible threat to all of Tamriel...Or is he? Delve into the lore and the backstories, and you find it's not all so cut-and-dry. Are those who would see the armies arrayed in secret shrines and ancient ruins destroyed truly your friends, or did Dagoth Ur have the right of it the whole time? You may need mods to actually side with the seemingly crazed living god, but even without them, you can see that he may not actually be the villain all the citizens of Morrowind are making him out to be. That ambiguity makes for a fascinating main story, and unlike the later games, it's paced very well for an open-world game, because your foe is a schemer. He's incredibly dangerous, but you never know how imminent that danger is. There's no false sense of urgency; instead, there's a sense of inevitability about impending doom if you don't act. You can leave the main quest completely alone in favor of side quests for hundeds of hours right in the middle and go back to it afterwards and it still feels like it makes sense in-game.

The guild quests have no overarching story, but their self-contained stories are generally interesting, and it's far less immersion-breaking to become the head of every major faction because A) you need the skills that faction cares about to ever be promoted anywhere near that high, and B) as the Nerevarine, you are a uniter of squabbling factions against the threat from Red Mountain, and so it makes some sense to have you leading numerous guilds that would otherwise oppose each other when you need to make arch enemies cooperate in the face of a common threat.

The side quests are also quite good, all of them hand-placed and written with care. None of those stupid strings of radiant dungeon-delving quests we got in Skyrim. Also, remember all those little pieces of DLC made for Oblivion and sold for a few bucks each? Remember Horse Armor? Well, Morrowind has a few of those as well, but they're completely FREE. Nothing as stupid as horse armor, either. Instead, you get small but good dungeon mods, short but decent quest mods, item mods with and without quests attached, and small immersion increases, and none of them cost you a penny. They are also all excellent, and generally recommended, except where you can find versions you prefer made by the community around ideas they got from the official version.

Finally, I would be most remiss not to mention the magic system. There are all sorts of crazy things you can do. Enchanting is also much more versatile than in Oblivion, let alone Skyrim. On-use magic items are something that Oblivion did away with completely, but in Morrowind, you could use a ring to summon creatures, or an amulet to shoot fireballs. Enchanting weapons with constant effects is gone in the later games as well. Beyond that, people of a particularly diabolical mindset have been known to enchant robes with constant effect damage health and place them on NPCs they want to see die, and on-use items allow you to get powerful effects that would be beyond overpowered if they were constant, either at the level you get them or at all. Furthermore, no TES game since has had anywhere near the diversity of magic effects found in Morrowind. Spells having a chance of failure if you try to cast ones that are too powerful is also something that makes sense to me as a lover of fantasy and an effective self-balancing mechanism. Yeah, you could try to cast that enormous fireball, and if it hit, everything you're after would die...but it only has a 55% chance of succeeding, and would drain most of your magicka to boot. Maybe try something safer? This means there's no hard skill checks, no magic number at which you suddenly get access to spells you couldn't cast before. If you have enough magicka and are willing to take the chance of failure given, you can try any spell you can think of. You might have to increase your skill for it to be worth the risk in the heat of battle, but trying new things in the middle of combat has always been a dangerous move in any case. But it could pay off...

Morrowind has long been one of the best of the best. What makes it so are the setting and the freedom. I got into the franchise with Skyrim, but Morrowind is truly its pinnacle. Sad to say we are unlikely to see anything like it as long as the corporate higher-ups at Bethesda see the Skyrim model as a safer bet. Sure, Skyrim is prettier, and many people prefer its combat, but it just can't do as much, not even with mods. Really, I think what turns most people off the combat system isn't that it's based somewhat in RNG, it's that it's based somewhat in RNG but there's no animations showing what happened, leading to ridiculous situations where people go "I stabbed that rat in the face at point blank range and missed!" rather than "It dodged again?! I guess rats are really fast..." I think the latter is enough more immersive that many people would be able to ignore it...so long as they know WHY they're missing (usually low fatigue because they're running everywhere). While there doesn't seem to be a mod to accomplish this now, when the open-source engine OpenMW hits version 1.0 and a full release, this kind of mod should be entirely possible, among a host of other options, such as natively working on Linux. (As of this review, OpenMW is on version 0.40 -- perfectly playable, but somewhat buggy and doesn't work with all mods.) There are, however, mods to make the combat like that in Skyrim and Oblivion -- I recommend the mod Oblivion-like Combat, which, as far as I know, is still only found on the official Bethesda forums. Finding mods for Morrowind can take a bit more searching than it does for Skyrim. Skyrim mods are mostly consolidated on the Nexus, with a few exceptions. Morrowind mods on the Nexus are few and far between. Most are found on Morrowind Modding History, Great House Fliggerty, or the personal websites of the authors. MMH in particular is an archive for all the mods formerly hosted on sites like Planet Elder Scrolls and ElricM which have gone down over the years. You can find some truly impressive and interesting stuff there and the quantity swamps the Nexus, with almost four times as many mods uploaded. Between GFH, MMH, the Nexus and all the other small sites out there hosting a handful of mods, I'm pretty sure there are more Morrowind mods available for download than Skyrim, and they're capable of affecting a lot more. Much of what's hardcoded in Skyrim's engine is able to be altered in Morrowind's, and because of the way the engine processes them as well as the scripting language used, scripts are both safer to use and more versatile. Beyond that, for things that ARE hardcoded, we have external utilities like the Morrowind Code Patch to make the changes we need, in addition to the script extender and others. The other enormous advantage Morrowind has over its sequels is its setting, which is strange, and alien, and very good at telling a story through the world itself. Morrowind is also where most of the series' interesting lore comes from. If you don't know how anyone can care about TES lore and haven't played Morrowind, that's probably why. One of their major writers for the game has written stuff that makes it look like he can't possibly be sober, and yet it somehow works. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look up Michael Kirkbride. The man is some strange variety of storytelling genius, even if he doesn't appear to be at first glance. Other majorly good things about Morrowind include its main quest, which is probably the highest-quality out of the series (by a very long way if you're only comparing it to Skyrim, and a bit less if you also include Oblivion). There's just something special about getting dropped on Vvardenfell with not a coin to your name and no idea what you're doing or why you're there, and working your way up to godlike power so you can face down a terrible threat to all of Tamriel...Or is he? Delve into the lore and the backstories, and you find it's not all so cut-and-dry. Are those who would see the armies arrayed in secret shrines and ancient ruins destroyed truly your friends, or did Dagoth Ur have the right of it the whole time? You may need mods to actually side with the seemingly crazed living god, but even without them, you can see that he may not actually be the villain all the citizens of Morrowind are making him out to be. That ambiguity makes for a fascinating main story, and unlike the later games, it's paced very well for an open-world game, because your foe is a schemer. He's incredibly dangerous, but you never know how imminent that danger is. There's no false sense of urgency; instead, there's a sense of inevitability about impending doom if you don't act. You can leave the main quest completely alone in favor of side quests for hundeds of hours right in the middle and go back to it afterwards and it still feels like it makes sense in-game. The guild quests have no overarching story, but their self-contained stories are generally interesting, and it's far less immersion-breaking to become the head of every major faction because A) you need the skills that faction cares about to ever be promoted anywhere near that high, and B) as the Nerevarine, you are a uniter of squabbling factions against the threat from Red Mountain, and so it makes some sense to have you leading numerous guilds that would otherwise oppose each other when you need to make arch enemies cooperate in the face of a common threat. The side quests are also quite good, all of them hand-placed and written with care. None of those stupid strings of radiant dungeon-delving quests we got in Skyrim. Also, remember all those little pieces of DLC made for Oblivion and sold for a few bucks each? Remember Horse Armor? Well, Morrowind has a few of those as well, but they're completely FREE. Nothing as stupid as horse armor, either. Instead, you get small but good dungeon mods, short but decent quest mods, item mods with and without quests attached, and small immersion increases, and none of them cost you a penny. They are also all excellent, and generally recommended, except where you can find versions you prefer made by the community around ideas they got from the official version. Finally, I would be most remiss not to mention the magic system. There are all sorts of crazy things you can do. Enchanting is also much more versatile than in Oblivion, let alone Skyrim. On-use magic items are something that Oblivion did away with completely, but in Morrowind, you could use a ring to summon creatures, or an amulet to shoot fireballs. Enchanting weapons with constant effects is gone in the later games as well. Beyond that, people of a particularly diabolical mindset have been known to enchant robes with constant effect damage health and place them on NPCs they want to see die, and on-use items allow you to get powerful effects that would be beyond overpowered if they were constant, either at the level you get them or at all. Furthermore, no TES game since has had anywhere near the diversity of magic effects found in Morrowind. Spells having a chance of failure if you try to cast ones that are too powerful is also something that makes sense to me as a lover of fantasy and an effective self-balancing mechanism. Yeah, you could try to cast that enormous fireball, and if it hit, everything you're after would die...but it only has a 55% chance of succeeding, and would drain most of your magicka to boot. Maybe try something safer? This means there's no hard skill checks, no magic number at which you suddenly get access to spells you couldn't cast before. If you have enough magicka and are willing to take the chance of failure given, you can try any spell you can think of. You might have to increase your skill for it to be worth the risk in the heat of battle, but trying new things in the middle of combat has always been a dangerous move in any case. But it could pay off...