I wouldn't say that Oblivion or Skyrim has much better gameplay, honestly. Yeah the weird dice-roll mechanic is gone, not that dice rolls necessarily make for a bad game (see the entire Baldur's Gate franchise, including the latest installment) but the combat in Oblivion and Skyrim isn't exactly good. It's floaty and feels really weird.

Oblivion retains more of Morrowinds roleplay mechanics, too. Skyrim is just a flat, empty game. They leant really far into this garbage faux viking aesthetic, complete with rubbish accents (as a Swede, we don't sound like that here in the Nordics) and there's nothing really memorable about it. It plays and feels about as drab as it looks.

Like to-date, there are still aspects of Oblivion and Morrowind I recall fondly. One of my favourite wow-moments in Oblivion was the quest with the woman who tasked you with finding her painter husband. That's a fun quest. Skyrim has nothing like that.

I don't think it's just because it's weird. It's because it's weird and immersive. Part of what makes it so immersive is that there's no modern fast travel. There are in game fast travel options but they can only get you to major settlements, or fortresses that you've found and cleared, or whatever point you've marked that you can use the recall spell to. Beyond that your on your own two feet. You want to get to the Urshilaku camp? Better start walking because you can't fast travel there. And at the start of the game you're slow as fuck. I still remember it being quite an adventure to get from Seyda Neen to Balmora on foot.

And that's to not even mention the quests. I don't wish the for the Morrowind style journal, but the quests didn't have a huge waypoint telling you exactly where to go. If you wanted to know where you had to go you had to listen to the directions you were given and then actually try to follow them. One of my more memorable side quests from Morrowind was where I misunderstood the directions, took the wrong left turn and kept searching for a farm almost all the way to Caldera. The actual farm was pretty much just around the corner had I taken the right turn. I don't even remember what the quest itself was about. I only remember getting lost.

I disagree on it being weird the thing that makes it great. No, it's because they cared. They wrote a deep intriguing story, and they trusted the player to treat the world as meaningful and to learn on their own. They expected you to read and to be interested.

Now, everything is dumbed down and simple, and it's baby fed to the player. There's little to discover that isn't shoved down your throat. Sure, there's (precedurally generated) loot to gather, but nothing more.

Morrowind was built as a world, and then they set a game there. The people, locations, and events make sense in that world. Starting especially with Skyrim, but even with Oblivion, it's built as a theme park. The world is just there to entertain you, but there's nothing behind the fecade.

Only a couple things need fixing.

No dice roll combat

Enemies don't aggro/prevent resting and saving from miles away

Yeah, Morrowind is my favorite game of all time.

These days I play it with higher res textures and a mod to make the wildlife less insanely hostile via the excellent OpenMW.

Morrowind was my favorite. I couldn't play Oblivion for more than an hour and I have tried multiple times over the years. Something about that game just bores me to death. Skyrim was good though, after getting some used to.

God, I immediately thought of Blizzard talking about how "No one wants to play Classic WoW" and yet... here we are...with like 7 versions of WoW Classic because, yes, people do want to play that shit.

Morrowind Online is one I still have to try. I fucking love Tamriel Rebuilt, and I've only explored a small fraction of the mainland.

I regret not to have played these Elder Scrolls games when they were new. These are really special games. At the time, I wasn't a fan of western RPGs and leaned heavily into JRPGs. But man, I regret it.

Morrowind was a terrible action game, and a fantastic hand-crafted world to explore.

Oblivion felt like a huge step back to me. Sure it looked a lot better, it was technically bigger, it was entirely voiced over, and its physics... err... existed.

But it was so bland. Completely generic environments, copy-pasted dungeons and buildings everywhere, almost any encounter a leveled rando with no personality.

And then everything they did to make the game more modern only made it more boring. Voiced over? Sure, enjoy everyone having one sentence of dialogue. Looking for stuff? Nobody's got time for that, just follow the magic compass.

I understand why they did those. But despite how janky Morrowind could be in some aspects, nobody can convince me Oblivion was the better game.

The combat is great. It just doesn't sit right with people that it's not as action RPG as it looks (swing and miss) and it never tells you how important stamina (fatigue) is.

Yeah combat aged very poorly

I disagree, it's a matter of what you are looking for and your taste in gaming.

I prefer combat like say in Morrowind or even the original Deus Ex. When I am playing an RPG, I want the combat to be challenging from a gameplay experience perspective (it's difficult to shoot when you start out in the OG Deus EX) and reflect the fact that you're a low level character and that you need to learn the game and understand how combat works.

Many modern RPGs almost play like an FPS with RPG elements tacked on. If I want to play an FPS, I will play a real FPS.

General UI/UX improvements are a must, but it's not wrong for combat to be on some level unintuitive when you start out.

It's sort of like saying Jazz has aged poorly just because it's not mainstream in the way it may have been 70+ years ago.

Morrowind only sold ~4 million units. I think you're overestimating how big the fan base is. The fan base is loyal, opinionated, and vocal, but small.