I tried this back when it first came out and left pretty underwhelmed. It wasn't bad, but it was fiddly to the point of irritating, the mechanics were unclear, and the combat seemed dull. I was also playing other games at the time and I wound up drifting away from it after hitting level 12 or so.

Now, I'm a huuuuuuge Morrowind dork. When the expansion came out, I decided to take the plunge on it if for no other reason than to revisit a game I spent easily a thousand hours on, just to see how it holds up.

First point to its credit: It does a truly a solid job of recreating the OG Morrowind experience. The map is nearly 1:1 as far as I can tell, though large portions of the middle mountain are inaccessible so the actual playable area is likely much smaller. It doesn't feel that way though; I'm easily 30+ hours in on my second attempt and I've yet to really do anything off the island of Vvardenfell except for some minor sight-seeing. I've not even touched the base game Main Quest, in true Elder Scrolls fashion, and the game totally allows for this.

More impressively however is that the game fully modernizes Morrowind. Every voice line has full (and well acted!) VO, complete with the actors making admirable attempts to pronounce all of Morrowind's insane dungeon names and Ashlander terms. Everything is much more lush and animated without losing any of the inherent weirdness of Morrowind. Telvanni mushroom towers are now inhabited by active NPCs who adhere to a day/night cycle and will work their jobs. Pages and assistants to the Telvanni mages fritter about talking among themselves. There's a ton of little details that have far more activity going on than the original game was ever able to allow, and it all just works. While it's set 700 years prior to Morrowind 1, there's still plenty of returning NPCs from Morrowind like Vivec and a much younger Divayth Fyr (that Telvanni Mage with the godlike Tower that players would always kill him and inhabit, and which had a dungeon below it (which is now a full-on raid, amusingly enough)).

Also impressively, the single player things you'd expect to be removed from an MMO, aren't. You can still pickpocket any NPC you like. Stealth works exactly the same as it does in Skyrim. Shoplifting items is a thing, as is selling stolen items to fences for cash. Bounties are enforced by guards, and just like Morrowind you can either pay them off on the spot or run (jail has been omitted but eh, whatever).

But the thing that's kept me playing is that this game is almost the Anti-WoW. Everything is vastly more complicated, seemingly as an intentional design choice, but unlike the launch version of the game it's now much more *crunchy* instead of needlessly fiddly. You can simply hammer out a few swords in the Blacksmithing profession and call it a day, OR you can dig deep into the system and craft some seriously powerful custom kit if you feel like it. Doing so, however, requires you to drop skill points into the system that could be spent on combat skills instead. Just like the Elder Scrolls games have always done, there's a significant choice to be made about character progression and they'll get better at the things they do more often than not. The complexity is initially pretty staggering but after a while you begin to be able to See The Matrix and the system winds up making perfect sense.

The approach to character level in general is a curious one as well in that there really isn't one. Everything in the game remains at the same base level, and gaining a level is reflected more in your skill points than any kind of base power creep. A wandering Alit becomes only marginally easier to kill at level 30 than it was at level 1, but the difference is that if you've acquired more skills, you simply have more kit at your disposal; you have to actually USE it, however. The numbers don't automatically get any higher.

This translates to gear being less effective as you outlevel it, making new gear necessary not so much to jack up your power level but to prevent it from falling off. It's...Counterintuitive, but it actually makes a lot of sense and serves the excellent purpose of never gating you off from content because you're not a sufficient level for it. You're ALWAYS a sufficient level for it, and it's always floating at a difficulty point that will provide a challenge. It takes some getting used to and was jarring at first, but now I find myself preferring it to the Dragonball-Style power creep in other RPGs. Smart stuff, if a bit unconventional.

Lastly, and impressively: This game is monstrously huge. There is an INSANE amount of stuff to do. It puts every other Elder Scrolls game, and honestly any other RPG I can even think of, to absolute shame in terms of sheer Crap To Do™. When you factor in that all of this is fully voiced and animated, the amount of content on display here is jaw-dropping. Wanna explore Elsweyr, the Khajit homeland? How about the Dragontail mountains, not seen since the original Daggerfall? The Gold Coast? Hammerfell? Daggerfall itself? It's all in here and it's super detailed and explorable.

~~And it's free.~~ EDIT: I'm an idiot, no it isn't, leaving this up because it's the only way I'll learn

Seriously. You can opt to pay $15 a month for the "Crown Plus" subscription. This is worth it if you plan on delving into the crafting aspect because you get a bottomless crafting item bag (which, believe me, you're GOING to want if you do any crafting), but if you simply want to ignore that aspect in favor of playing through the plot and going on exploration adventures, you can absolutely just play the free base game and be none the worse for wear. If anything, the $15 sub should be considered a Crafting subscription as opposed to anything gating off the proper game. It's incredibly useful for that feature, but really ONLY that feature, and you don't need to do it in order to play the content at all. Scaled item drops will always keep you sufficiently geared and you'll easily have a couple hundred hours worth of content to explore freely without limitation even if you never drop a single cent into the game itself.

So in short, yeah. This is absolutely worth checking out in 2018, and I strongly recommend anyone with a fondness for Morrowind to drop the cash on the Expansion that allows you to play through it and check it out. 100% worth it even if that's all you ever do in the game.

If you do opt to check it out, hit me up in-game. I'm on the EU Megaserver (I have no idea why, it's where it put me for some reason) and can be found @DJMalloc. Let's go explore the ash wastes and pick fights with Cliff Racers.

(There are still so, so many cliff racers. My god.)