Video about Morrowind and Skyrim - worth watching

Hey, I don't know if this is the right place for this, but I didn't find a better one, but in case it's wrong here: I'm sorry, please move it.

I stumbled over a video about the main quests of Skyrim and Morrowind yesterday and I thought it would be a good video to watch to remember what the qualities of Morrowind were that we wish to recreate here.

LOOK AT IT
CAUTION: SPOILERS FOR SKYRIM'S AND MORROWIND'S MAIN QUEST OBVIOUSLY

Please bear through the first few minutes that seem to be a pretty unfair rant against Skyrim at first. I don't want this to be some kind of Skyrim VS Morrowind thread.

I just think in the second part of the video where he talks about Morrowind and it's qualities, he makes some very sharp observations about what makes Morrowind feel different from Skyrim and makes it a game with one of the most intriguing and convincing game worlds out there.

I always felt like there were a lot of differences between Morrowind and the later titles in that quality and I thought I knew why. But even after over ten years and at least 3 playthroughs, this guy manages it to find a few things that contribute to this feeling that absolutely made sense to me but I wasn't aware of them before watching this video.

TL;DR: Watch this video to remind yourself / let it explain you why Morrowind is such a special game for so many people and where that feeling comes from, so you can keep this in mind when trying to recreate this special feeling in Skyrim.

I watched it a couple of days

I watched it a couple of days ago, and I agree with most of the points he makes, but while Skyrim's main quest was poorly written, and most of all, badly paced (theres a mod for it, cant find it right now though), the side quests are quite nice. Every major faction (Thieves guild, mages guild, companions, dark brotherhood) has a very fun questline, with a fun ending that answers most, if not all of your questions. The biggest problem, atleast for me, were the dungeon crawls. I hate them with a passion, and the long load times (I only recently got an ssd) didn't help.

I wouldn't call it "unfair"

I wouldn't call it "unfair" against Skyrim. Skyrim was bad imo.

As I said, I don't want this

As I said, I don't want this to be a Skyrim VS Morrowind thread. I didn't like Skyrim very much either, but for me the point is: If it comes down to how they work, they are totally different games.

My main problem with Skyrim was always that it was so formulaic, after playing a few quests you know how it's going. 90% of the quests are just: Recovering something from an old nordic ruin (often without explaining why that item was even there). And then you just traveled there, went in the dungeon, killed a lot of draugr, solved some puzzles that didn't really seem to make a lot of sense and slayed a boss to be rewarded with the quest item and some leveled loot. This makes the game more accessible and more rewarding for most people, it works like traditional RPGs or even MMOs nowadays. But the quests have to be seen disconnected from the story or the world, they don't support the immersion. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad game, but it's definitely another path than TES III went.

Morrowind worked totally different, instead of trying to implement traditional risk-reward patterns (Kill a big / difficult boss. -> Get great loot. -> Level up. Kill a harder boss -> Get better loot.), Morrowinds whole world and level design seemed to be focused on making the world feel real. If you had to go in some old ruins and dungeons you had to do that to recover some old artifacts, and there was (with varying degrees) an understandable reason to do that. And these artifacts where positioned at places that seemed to make sense, instead of just putting them behind some big boss to make them the reward for slaying him.

And this seems - to me - to be a very important aspect to always keep in mind when redesigning and reimagining this world: Make it believable. Make a world that feels complex and realistic instead of trying to spice it up by artificially creating a series of trials out of something that should actually "just" be a dangerous place. This makes the world more interesting and makes the rare epic moments stand out more. And that is - for all I know - a big part of what that special Morrowind feeling is about.