Morrowind is infuriating to play until you've modded out cliff racers and a whole bunch of broken junk. Skyrim's the first TES game I played that didn't feel like a giant pile of shit the first time I started up, and I played Daggerfall pretty close to launch. Skyrim was...actually fun? Like, it didn't constantly piss me off and require me to mod the shit out of it just to not be angry at it? What did you do, Bethesda?
Idk, I first played Morrowind I think in 2003 or 2004. I played the worst possible version, the Xbox game of the year edition, and I thought it was cool. It wasn't perfect by any means, but it felt like an mmorpg only single player and on a console, which was very cool to me (remember, mmo's back then were much different than ones that came later). I liked the weird 3d world, the way character progression went (using specific skills to raise them) which reminded me of Ultima Online, which I was a big fan of at the time. And I know that even people who adore Morrowind get very annoyed at the Cliff Racers, but I never found them to be all that annoying. Since I was playing on the Xbox, I couldn't mod it, of course, but I found it very enjoyable. I liked the background story of the world, and found myself reading all the books that you'd find in-game. I also liked that it started out pretty challenging, and that there was a lot of openness in the way you designed your character and how you could create your own, custom made spells.
I never finished the game on the Xbox copy that I had, but I did get most of the way through the main quest, and finished several of the factions on a few different characters that I had made.
It wasn't the first of its kind, not even close. Daggerfall came out in 1996, and of course was a total mess. A release copy was actually unbeatable, and I had to get the patch from a friend who had access to BBSes or something. Also, Ultima Underworld came out in 1992 and, while the scale isn't impressive now, it was a similar conceit and absolutely mind-blowing in scope at the time. Of course, unlike the TES games, it isn't a shambling, broken heap that has to be modded to be fun, so that one never seems to get mentioned.
Yeah, that's why I said it was "sort of" the first of its kind, not the absolute first. I never heard of Daggerfall when it came out. I don't even remember seeing it in stores though this could be a case of me just not remembering. I was into PC games, too. I remember playing a few games before we had a CD-Rom on the PC in my family's house, but after is when I really started getting into them, beginning with Civilization (which came with the CD-Rom we had) and Alone in the Dark 1 and 2 (those were on floppy disk though). Later, I was more into warcraft 1&2 and command and conquer on PC, rather than rpg games. I think the first rpg's I really played on my computer was Diablo, Fallout, and Baldur's Gate. I completely missed Daggerfall though I doubt I would have liked it at the time.
When I say it was sort of the first of it's kind as an open world, 3d rpg, I mean in the way that it's a 3d world with detail, and elevation: mountains, caves, villages, cities, etc. I remember Ultima Underworld, despite not playing it, but that was pretty much restricted to just a dungeon, no? I liked the fact that Morrowind had cities you could explore, as well as caves, dungeons, and the like. I know Daggerfall had the same thing, but it looked so much more primitive and was so much flatter than Morrowind.
Maybe you thought Morrowind was the first if the only RPGs you'd ever played before were on the SNES. But it wasn't first, and I was among a nontrivial group of people who had already gotten tired of Bethesda's dog crap quality and nonexistent testing in the 1990s and was thoroughly unimpressed when they once again failed to deliver a game that actually worked.
Before I played Morrowind I had been really big into those games I mentioned before: Fallout 1/2, Baldurs gate 1/2, Arcanum, Diablo 1/2, Ultima Online (from 97-2003 or so) and I used to play Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior on the old nintendo, but yeah Super Nintendo was when I really got into rpg's. I remember playing a few really old rpgs on the PC back in the day, some of the dungeon and dragons games, but I never really got in to them. I was too young to understand the complexity so they couldn't keep my interest at that time. As far as old PC games go, I used to really like the text based, choose your own adventure type games. My neighbor had a bunch of them and I remember every time I'd go to her house we'd play different ones. There was a Dirty Harry game that was really vulgar, I remember, and some other one where you played a James Bond like spy. There would be an entire screen or two of text, then 4 or 5 different options you could choose at the bottom. Many of the options would kill you immediately, or get you arrested, ending your game.
Arena sucked (but I can cut it some slack as a freshman effort), Daggerfall sucked, Morrowind sucked, Oblivion might be the single worst RPG I have managed to actually finish, and Skyrim was actually all right.
I liked Morrowind a lot back in the day, especially when I got it on PC. I didn't need mods to enjoy it either. It's not my favorite game, but back when it was new to me, I dug it a lot. I played through it a few times over the years, the last time only using OpenMW and a high def mod, nothing that changed the rules around or anything.
And lol about Oblivion. I liked Oblivion a lot when it came out. It kept my interest the entire way through. It was one of the first games I got on my 360 back then. I think Morrowind is objectively the better game, but Oblivion was fun to me. I played through it at least twice.
I liked Skyrim too, when it first came out, and played it quite a bit at that time. It's just as I went through the game, I realized how awful the writing was for the factions that used to be interesting. And of all the Elder Scrolls games I actually played, Skyrim was the one I couldn't even bring myself to finish. And once I put it down, I never once had the urge to pick it up again and try to finish it. That's why I say it's a dogshit game. It's insane to me that people still play it in 2022, even with mods.
All this stuff is super subjective, of course. I just think of Skyrim as a game that was okay when it originally came out, but that got less and less interesting the more you played it. Rpg's are the one genre of games that I always finish once I start playing them, as long as they keep my interest, of course. I think Skyrim is one of the only ones that I've never finished and had zero desire to ever return to. It's so weird to me that people have hundreds if not thousands of hours of playtime for this game. I mean, what do they even do all that time? The storyline is not good. The factions are not good. The combat is dated. Do they just go around fighting monsters or do they restart and play the terrible story again and again? It's just all very odd to me.
I'm happy for you that you enjoyed it at the time. I did too. I just found it much lamer than Morrowind and Oblivion. It had the flashier combat with the finishing moves, and I still like how you could use magic in one or both hands and a weapon in the other. I just found the factions and the main questline abysmal compared to the two earlier TES games that I played, which were definitely flawed but kept me interested in the world, the factions, and the narrative. And again, I find it very strange that people still spend so much time on this game, even now, when there is so much else out there you could be playing.
