Well for him, thousands of people is basically nothing. Skyrim has sold over 60 million copies.

One of the problems with growth in popularity is a growth in expectations. A Morrowind remaster that sold even 1 million copies would be considered a failure.

If they revisit Morrowind, they need to go ALL IN on it. Keep the setting and themes but redo everything else. I love Morrowind as a world to get lost in but the combat gameplay in particular is quite bad, possibly the low point of the entire Elder Scrolls franchise.

I enjoy the combat in Oblivion, Skyrim, AND Daggerfall more than Morrowind, simply due to the feel of weapons connecting with enemies. Daggerfall probably feels the best, due to the crunchiness of it and the way you can do different types of swings in rapid succession.

The exploration stuff in Morrowind is just amazing though. Some of the dungeons are like Russian dolls of awesomeness! Also just love the music. So relaxing!

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 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.

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.

Only a couple things need fixing.

No dice roll combat

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

The Oblivion remaster is a lot more than just modern graphics though... There are a ton of completely changed mechanics, new ones and others that are just tweaked. It's very much not just a graphical refresh.

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.

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

Yeah, I never finished the main quest or all the factions in Skyrim. I did everything in Morrowind. That game is the most immersive game I've ever played. Nothing has gotten close since. Even with the shitty combat system.

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.