Is Morrowind a good game, or just overrated with nostalgia?

Both! Things like not being able to re-roll your character if you somehow manage to royally screw it up and having to start the whole game from scratch simply looks like poor game design in 2013. The skill system in general is pretty bad (who remembers jumping everywhere to level their athletic skill?).

I've not played Oblivion or Skyrim yet, maybe you end up jumping around everywhere in those too, but I hope not.

From what I see people who have played Morrowind say, it sounds pretty much like Oblivion (which Ive played) only perhaps a lesser quality in graphics and some lesser gameplay mechanics and story. But it still sounds as exciting as Oblivion nonetheless.

You just have to remember that Skyrim is like another world in my opinion. All you have to do is be open minded and dont expect something totally similar and im sure you'll have a good time playing Morrowind as well. I do recommend playing Oblivion, its one heck of an awesome game

Actually there isn't a good answer. I recommended Morrowind to many people, but everyone had different opinion about it. For some it's an awesome game, much better than Skyrim. Other say that it's stupid, ugly and Skyrim is better in every way.

But one thing is sure for me. Morrowind and Skyrim are very different. I liked both, but not for same things.

The graphics and mechanic can be a bit dated but the game is still good to play. First played Morrowind after having played Skyrim (non-nostalgic), I would say I would go and play again from time to time. That means it's good enough for me. Haven't tried Oblivion.

Even now I prefer Morrowind over horrible, bland, and boring Skyrim. And no, Morrowind is nothing like Oblivion, let that one be forgotten.
mod

If the graphics really bother you (I find them to be perfect, the "technology", with maybe 3-4 faces per race, and 2 voices per race, might be a bit old, but the consistency, quality and aesthetic is great), you can use mods that make the game just as pretty as Skyrim with mods. I personally consider Morrowind 500x better than Oblivion, and even better than Skyrim, but I might be biased. Not sure what you mean by less-fallouty, though. Morrowind is a pretty open world game, in the proper sense of the term. You might feel a little lost at the start, there is no "fast-transport", other than a couple silt striders and teleporters at the mage's guild and a mark/recall spell. You have to walk everywhere, and there are no map markers, you just follow directions. Aside from the spells enchantments and potions you can buy or learn, you can also combine spells and enchantments and potions, and make them anywhere. The story is interesting to follow, but the really great thing is the world itself- all the different opposing guilds and clans and towns, and the people. Unlike Skyrim (and Oblivion), there's very little "rubbish" to loot and pick up- aside from a couple plates and forks and stuff you can pick up, it is all useful stuff. Also unlike Skyrim and Oblivion, you have proper levitation spells which you can use continuously (until it runs out, obviously)
If you're looking for a game that will hold your hand, point you to the next place you need to go, explain what you need to do, try to force the story down your throat, then this game is not for you. If you're looking for a totally open world game where you might get lost following people's directions, explore the countryside meet weird people asking for your help or cheat you, sometimes just launch yourself into the sky with an Acrobatics potion and fly and fall down in another town, other times climb to the top of the tower and jump down just to up your Acrobatics skill at the cost of halfing your health, and so on..you might like this.

The whole TES Series is a great work in my opinion. All episodes have tons of content where you can spend 300+ hours per game to explore everything. And all games have tons of mods and DLC's with you can enhance the game in any possible ways. I also suggest to try Fallout 3 and Fallout NV.

Morrorwind is the best game in the TES series. Give it a try.

Morrowind is great, just install the overhaul mod and it looks amazing aswell. One of the best rpg's I have played.

Morrowind isn't the best "out of the box" but after adding some mods it is amazing.

Use Morrowind Overhaul 3.0 for better graphics and better overall experience as Morrowind is preety old.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d69wYi3_LWo

Morrowind is the best of the series. But I doubt people will play it because graphic is.... aargh

People are blinded because of nostalgia.

Of course it's not aged well, but that doesn't mean it's not an epic game

To me Morrowind was a great start (I know it's not the first ES game, but the first one that had a detailed, non-random world). The atmosphere was great and I was fascinated by the detailed open world. The gameplay was a bit of a letdown since there are more exploits and broken game mechanics than Cliffracers. I still played the game for more than 200 hours and completed almost every quest. I hoped they would fix all the gameplay problems in the next game, but it only got worse with every game.

Back in 2002 it was definitely a fantastic (albeit slightly broken) game, but I'm not sure I would enjoy it that much nowadays. Dungeons are extremely repetitive and small, quests are 90% fetch quests which require you to find a location based only on a vague description. On the other hand there aren't many open world 1st person RPGs to choose from, so if you don't mind the graphics (even with mods you'll have blocky, stiff looking NPCs and creatures and generally not so great graphics - good graphics aren't only about shiny water, highres textures and nice shadows) and enjoyed Skyrim it may be worth a try.

The main differences, IMO, between Morrowind and later games are these:
1: Setting. Morrowind takes place on an island with a much more interesting atmosphere. There are swamps, ash storms, giant mushrooms (which wizards hollow out and use as towers) and all kinds of fantasy creatures as opposed to the IMO boring creatures you see in Oblibion and Skyrim (bears, wolves, etc.)

2: Hand-holding. There are no quest markers in Morrowind. People tell you how to find your target and you find it. There's no magic compass arrow. There's also no fast travel, not from the map anyway. There are services much like the carriage in Skyrim that can take you places, but those are mostly to towns. Anywhere else? You have to walk. There is no level scaling. If you walk into the wrong place, you can get destroyed. That makes surviving those places all the more satisfying to me.

3: Combat. This is the biggest issue a lot of people have with this game but to me it's the clearly better system. It's a lot more "traditional RPG" than "action game". It's largely stat based, particularly your stamina. Stamina matters in this game. If you have high stamina (current stamina, not max stamina), your attacks will hit harder and more often. If you have exhausted your stamina by swinging blindly like a moron or trying to run circles around your enemy, your attacks will do less damage and miss often (the attack looks like it connected but your enemy's health doesn't decrease and there's a different sound effect). Spells will fail to cast.

4: Choices and Consequence. Lots of things that wouldn't matter in later games actually mean something in this one and to me that's great. For instance, guilds have stat and skill requirements for joining and promotions. You can't go be grandmaster of the mages' guild if you're not actually a mage. There are a lot more weapon choices as well, and your skill determines how well you do with each. Your skill is increased with practice.

I've gone long enough, but some other miscellaneous features include levitation (all cities are exterior cells, so levitation can actually be a thing without ruining anything), block being an automatic chance rather than something you have to manually do, essential NPCs can all be killed (though there is a message that tells you that you fucked up).

Also as I was writing this, I remembered this page so that might help.

Hands down, it is the Best game of the series. Nostalgia doesn't change that it is a great game and I can only recommend it. Of course if you already own/played Skyrim it would seem old, even outdated.

As for the people saying the series is overrated: Haters gonna hate.

Is it overrated? IMO no, but its not for everyone, and for those who dont like it, it will be overrated.

MW has a bigger learning curve compared to the newer TES games, its more difficult and unforgiving if you don't know the rules. There is no hand holding and its not balanced in the same way either, where everything is balanced to your level. You will find enemies at lvl 1 that u cant kill till lvl 10 or later, u can also find valuable/powerful items, if you are lucky or know where to go... Things are much more static, which n turn lends the game to be exploited. There are many bugs (which can be overcome with mods) and it has not dated well (somewhat fixable with mods as well).

I can still play the vanilla game and enjoy it immensely :)

Morrowind is not a casual RPG game. You cannot let game to hold your hand, there are no waypoints. It is not overrated. Unless you go powergaming it will be challenging and hard. and you must focus on dialogues and etc stuff.

I played Morrowind when it came out, it was bundled with my graphic card. At it was awesome! Haven't gotten around to playing it again ever since, but I like it better than Oblivion. The setting is just great, really alien. Wizard towns in wich every house in fungi like tress, ancient dwemer ruins infested with clockwork vermin, giant insectoids for fast transportation, and vast extenses of barren wasteland inhabited by nomadic dark elven natives! Locations are much much more memorable than Oblivion's. Can't compare to Skyrim as I haven't played it yet.

Morrowind is the best Elder Scrolls ever, only downside: it's a tad dated but mods can solve a bit.

Morrowind > Oblivion > Skryim imo. The games got worse imo. Skyrim really was a big dissapointment. :(

I'm probably going to be called out on this, but as a not-fan of the TES series, and as a newcomer, I'll try and sum up my thoughts about it and give an unbiased "versus review" of the two.

First off, Morrowind has a ton of spells, weapons and potions that you can use/create for your enjoyment, and I don't feel like Skyrim did a great deal of updating these. It's probably for the better, seeing how Morrowind hat a tad too lot to do in addition to its vertigo-inducing magnitude of variety when it comes to items, spells and quests. And then, if you want literally thousands of goods in your game, only a few mods will help it in both cases.

The combat system, I think, is abominable in Morrowind. Whereas Skyrim feels like a very comfy little adventure with its swift controls and clear goals and interface, Morrowind is something that will confuse you at first, and frustrate you once you understand how it works. Regardless of what you pick at the beginning of your game, your weapons should be limited to spears, thanks to their ability to keep your enemies out of range most of the time. Then, whatever specialization you picked, will only work marginally at the beginning, and this has puzzled me greatly. Imagine it like a fucked up turn based RPG, where the turns have been removed. The result is that there are still "misses" that you can make, even though you are clearly hitting your targets on screen. This kind of shit was not even part of Arena, so it puzzles me why they thought it to be necessary here. The game doesn't indicate it ANYWHERE that you are missing hits, and if you were unlucky enough to not know about it, you could have wasted hours into the game thinking that you fucked up your character creation, or worse yet, just give up on the game thanks to this major confusion. Once you figured it out, you'll understand that if you want to start as a ranged character, you have to fight with different weapons at first, and if you are a magician, you'll be generally raped until you get decent in it. Skyrim doesn't lie about its variety though, or to be more precise, it doesn't limit you in the beginning. What you pick, is what you get, but you can absolutely go for other styles and methods and they will work too. Possibly a bit overkill, and maybe just making that one choice work in the beginning would have made it better, but I'll take this a thousand times over the bullshit that Morrowind put me through in the beginning.

There's also the environment, and the setting. A lot of people would choose Morrowind here, and I can understand. It looks beautiful even though it's a decade old now, and the art style just more than meets the eye. I, on the other hand, would choose Skyrim again, and before I seem a bit biased as to why, let me explain myself. First off, I love low-poly environments a fuck ton, but only if they have a nice variety of colors to it and are lit really well with them. Heretic 2, Dead To Rights, Max Payne and SHOGO are prime examples for these, and somewhere I feel like Morrowind missed a point there. It would have been great to have a few colorful lights painting the surroundings here and there, but instead it opted for a rather droll scale of grey-brown-red-black environments, with rather few other colors ever appearing. There possibly may be mods to fix this problem though, but I never looked into it. There's also another fetish I have with visual styles, and it's, well... snow. There's some of that in Morrowind, but it's really just a small amount and it's located on a secluded island in the north. On top of that, the island is featured in Skyrim's DLCs, so that makes it all the less inviting for me to play Morrowind. In conclusion, the lighting is only slightly better in Skyrim (i.e. still kinda droll, like Fallout 3), and the art direction in both games are just amazing. I suggest you take a look at a few screenshots and decide which one you like better from those, because even though I like Skyrim's more, it's a personal preference and nothing more. They're equally good.

Monsters and people, well, gotta admit that monsters and the flora and fauna are both equally great in Morrowind and Skyrim. Sure, Morrowind has the awesome striders, and all the floating shit you can find out in the open, but Skyrim makes up for it by making its feral cats, wolves, elks and even horses look unique and amazing. They could have gone with boring realistic depictions, but they filled it with awesome instead. Also, giants. I'm actually surprised that not a lot of fantasy games have these guys, it's a breath of fresh air to get my ass kicked by them in Skyrim. People on the other hand are generally more boring in Morrowind, and so is the writing. It's all Star Wars prequel-y if you ask me; too much politics, and too little personal level stories. KOTOR games weren't great and interesting only because they were about you saving the universe, but also because nearly every NPC you met had an interesting background. That's the vibe I'm getting from Skyrim, and I enjoyed chatting with that wine-adoring woman in Whiterun near the start of the game. That's not to mention the main quest, which is probably the first in a Bethesda game that actually interests me. Although, I must admit, I use a mod called Interesting NPCs, so this might be only because of that.

Finally, I'd choose Skyrim over Morrowind, even though I'm what you'd usually call an elitist old PC hipster. I hated how Skyrim was hyped when it came out and refused to even try it, but now that I have it, I'm delightfully proven wrong by it, and I love it. Is Morrowind a classic? Yes, it is. But it's like X-Com (NOT Enemy Unknown, but the old ones, mind you), where only the core audience is able to truly enjoy it, and where it puts you through a steep learning curve. It's not user-friendly, it's a tad lot more boring for someone who's not that interested in its lore, and it just oversaturates you with choices and variety. I never felt like having too many things to choose from in a game before, but this one made me hate it forever. You will enjoy Morrowind if you can put up with a little bit of inaccessibility in the beginning, and if, generally speaking, you're one hell of a patient player with lots of time on your hand. Otherwise, I'd probably try myself with Gothic 2 or something similar. There's plenty out there.

How old are you? How could you possibly not play Morroiwnd? Are you like 18 or something?
But, staying on topic, Morrowind is better than Skyrim. If you put graphics aside that is (you can still find some pretty cool graphics mods for Morrowind that will make your pc choke, though). The story is FAR better. Seriously, Skyrim's main story is so overrated it makes me angry. "Oh, mighty dragonslayer, slay some dragons that want to kill us all". That's like basics of the basics of fantasy stories, what the fuck Bethesda? In Oblivion you had pretty cool main story, Morrowind was even better and then... bam! Dragons! What a nonsense!
Oh, but maybe it's just me, an old crook who started his adventer with The Elder Scrolls back when Arena came out. And then was my favourite game in the series - Daggerfall. That huge, epic word made me drop my jaw on the floor first time I sunk into that game. If you don't mind stone-age graphics, I'd recommend you playing Daggerfall.
Also, Gothic? Well, more like BUGthic (or buGothic) for me. G1 and G2 were bugged (followers were dumb as fuck), but on the other hand, there was pretty iteresting story, so yeah, G1 and G2 were good games. G3 has open-world, but it lacks some good quests (even with Community Patch & Quest Pack).

Sorry for my English, not my mother tongue.

Oblivion and Skyrim is just dumbed down versions of Morrowind to me. In morrowind, the system is more complex, being a magician requires serious strategy for example. And the possibilities are endless. You can use weird magic combinations and mock the enemy, use very weird and powerful potions etc. There is no compass or huge marker to point out where you should go. So, it is not dumbed down, but that does not mean it is better. Imho, it is the best one of the series (my avatar wink wink) but some people may prefer the other ones. Of course age is an issue, I would love to move objects as in oblivion, or use horses etc. but... even travelling is much easier and boring in the latter games. In morrowind if you lack imagination you have to walk. Or you can fly, or try to reach your destination with a big huge jump. Again, lots of possibilities. I remember the times that me and my friends were talking about the strategies of just traveling. With plugins and mods, you can improve the graphics etc. so the game being old may not bother you that much.
TL;DR: If you like the atmosphere of the elder scrolls series, you should play Morrowind. The system is harder, but gives more freedom. (play it just for jump, levitation spells! :))

n'wah!!