I've tried to get into Morrowind so many times over the years, and it just never sticks. One time I found myself falling in love with it mechanically, gleefully playing with spell construction, but eventually fell away from it when I got tired of being sent across the barren fucking map to deliver a message over and over. I think at this point I should give up and accept that what I'm looking for does not exist in TES before Oblivion. No matter how much I try to wander through Morrowind hoping to find charming little stories like you get in later Bethesda games, I won't find them. In game books are a really nice supplement which I enjoy, but they don't make up for the utter lack of character anywhere in the game world.

Morrowind is loved by TES lore purists and hardcore RPG players alike and while I share many of their preferences, this just doesn't come together into a cohesive whole at all. There's no flavor to the world. Each area feels the same, NPCs are not individuals you can speak to and learn about, etc.

It's a pity, because mechanically I really enjoy what's here. It has this unique way of making the game really difficult to play straight-up, but teasing you with all these different skills and methods of progression that are just asking you to abuse them. It's such a fun sandbox to play around in, I just wish there was any life in it.

In high school, one of my friends bought me a copy of Morrowind for the Xbox when he found out I got an Xbox. He really liked Morrowind, and wanted me to like Morrowind too.

This was 2005, and Morrowind for the Xbox had been out for a while; so had the Xbox itself. Most people had traded in their Xbox by this point, because Halo 2 had been out for quite a while and there was nothing else to play on the Xbox; this sent the cost of Xbox games through the proverbial floor, and ironically resulted in there being lots of games to play on the Xbox, even if you didn’t have a ton of money to spend because you were 16 years old. I played Marvel vs Capcom 2, Capcom vs SNK 2 EO, Guilty Gear X2 #Reload, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Burnout 3, Fable, Psychonauts, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio Future, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay, Ninja Gaiden Black and a whole load of other really good games that did not really cost a lot of money. I did not, however, play The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, because The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is really boring. It’s a game about walking between Wikipedia pages.

Despite the fact that Xbox games were very cheap and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was very boring, I was still touched by my friend’s gesture of buying me a video game. As such, I spent about four months of my life reading about other people playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind so that I could convincingly lie to my friend about playing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. That’s how much I liked my friend. That’s how boring The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is.

I played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind again tonight via the weird time-travel magic of the original Xbox emulator, and I was unsurprised to find that The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is still really boring, despite the fact that you can now see further than before and the textures look nicer (or so I’m told) and the game loads really fast (gotta load all that text!). I’m sorry, friend from the past - but if you somehow showed up on my doorstep tomorrow with a new copy of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind for me, I’d still lie to you about The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind being really not boring. Some things never change!