obviously u can take me with a grain of salt if u know my tastes,,, but for however badly vivec is laid out, or however weird it is that a bunch of white guys from maryland keep trying to do meaningful commentary on imperialism but their main nuance is to make the occupied peoples Xenophobic and Supremacist, or however overly small and unmotivated the soundtrack is, this rly does come closer then just about anything else to fulfilling the Promise of the computer rpg world. definitely not necessarily the computer rpg, its not really reactive enough for that...but when i first found out about skyrim as a Young Child, the promise that was made that intoxicated me was that i was going to enter an entire world, believable and living, which was my playground but that existed apart from me. currently i do think the Open World is probably best served by less traditional games...eastshade, lil gator game, even death stranding use their spaces for more Big Expressive Ideas then simply to emulate some kind of Reality thru compromised shorthand. but morrowind nails on the goldest possible version of itself...a small island, culturally and politically dense and self-sufficient but still involved in larger conflicts, extremely diverse in terms of aesthetics but all feeling coherent anyway. u see where they get their food, where those who want to get away from everyone else live, where the centers of local and occupational government are, the slow errosion of any imperial structures the further away you are from seyda neen. and the granular growth of the RPG Journey is equally intoxicating...the emphasis on pure Numbers rather then real-time skill is a roadblock to some, but its the main thing that sells your progression...the way it fundamentally feels to do things is appreciably different at the start and end of the game. the faction quests in particular were a huge highlight for me, very simple moment to moment, but their cumulative effect is way more impactful then anything i can recall from skyrim.

when open world games let me keep playing past the completion of the main quest, my main way to achieve closure before the uninstall is to simply walk all the way back to the starting area, preferably to the place i first took control. i aim to do this without any fast travel or consulting the map if possible. in some games this is more feasible then others, but morrowind is perfect for it. in doing so i passed thru some of the first roads i ever walked thru, the first big city i found, the first imperial outpost i found, the first ancestral tomb i raided before giving up on tomb raiding and becoming religious out of penance, the little town where i met the first memorably weird npc who gave me a quest, and finally the place where i killed my first mudcrab. it was, genuinely, a greatly emotionally pregnant experience. the main quest is great honestly, and i love how it ends framing itself as basically a superhero origin story for your character. but more then anything, it felt like My adventure. my aforementioned religious penance, the time i spent adventuring in the bitter coast and west gash before ever going to balmora, the way i slowly clawed my way up to the top of house redornan (which started full of hostile ashlanders and ended with me having a mansion and every guard fawning over me), the way i stumbled into a levitation artifact about halfway through my playthrough that i used up till the end of the game, the way being the nerevarine caused a crisis of faith which had me embracing my new self but still holding onto my temple beliefs stubbornly, and the way that the ordinators that were supposed to be killing me for being a heretic ended up mostly killing me for stealing their sacred armor. i dont think any other of this Kind of rpg has given me these kinds of memories, not even my beloved new vegas. wealth beyond measure indeed.