After playing a lot of Skyrim before trying out Morrowind and getting a good way through the main questline, I can now proudly say "HELL YES" in answer to that question. The story this game tells is amazing, deep, exciting and rich. Any cons I have are very minor, but here they are:
- NPCs don't have sleep schedules. Thus, shops are always open, even at the darkest hours of night. It's something small that really breaks immersion for me.
- The lack of fast travel has been mentioned, but that isn't what bothers me. No, it's the low running speed that you start out with. Even the animation looks like your character's moving in slow motion through a sea of karo corn syrup. You can't run for crap and usually can't get away expediently from dangerous enemies. However, speed's something you have to earn in this game and when you gain enough skill in Athletics to be able to move at a good pace, it feels really satisfying to have reached that point.
- NPCs get stuck easily. I've seen smugglers and ordinators struggle to figure out a way to get up a flight of stairs and attack me. I've seen cliff racers get stuck on rocks or in trees. I've seen a kwama forager fall into a pile of rocks and be unable to crawl back out. I've lost my own traveling companion when he refused to leave an underground stream for no apparent reason. It's to be expected of a game this old though. Ah well.
- Inventory sorting is pretty bad, probably worse than vanilla Skyrim. Every time you want to grab a scroll or a potion, you have to go through a sea of other magical items. The spell list gets cluttered pretty easily too. All you can really do about it is stay on top of your inventory or possibly go mod-hunting.
- A lot of the dungeons are really short, compared to Skyrim anyway. But then again, there are a good few massive ones too. It's all the more fun when you find one of those, a real test of endurance.
And now for the pros:
- This game uses text boxes to relay information, as opposed to fully voiced acting. This may be a con to some, but I believe it to be a superior method. If characters are speaking with text boxes, the sky's the limit on what they can be saying. In this game, it is entirely possible to have dozens of conversations with any NPC whatsoever. You can walk up to any townsperson and ask for directions. You can bribe them for valuable info. You can ask them about their history or local lore. And perhaps best of all, all NPCs have the ability to call you by your name. Your character isn't just known by some ancient title, but as a real, living person.
- Which leads into the next point - the journal. It may be a little messy if you're looking for a specific quest, but it is also highly amusing to read and sometimes enlightening. There's a lot of funny, off-kilter comments written in it by your character, adding more character to what was previously nothing more than a blank canvas.
- Magic is ridiculously fun to play with. It seems that there's a lot more spells to have fun with, especially when you're not in combat. Water-walking, levitation, open lock, fortify acrobatics, slow fall...you would not believe how satisfying it is to go running over the surface of a lake or flying around a wizard's tower or bouncing like a rubber ball up to a high platform. I've also heard that the spell-making system is particularly good, though I haven't tried it out myself yet.
- As mentioned previously, the faction system. There's just so many of them and an it's an actual, worthy accomplishment to climb up to the top of a faction. Another thing about factions is that they all offer trainers and shops, with considerable discounts for faction members.
- Trainers - with them you can train as many times as your pocketbook can handle. And the more you train, the better too - it helps a lot with leveling. It's so much better to be able to go out into the wilderness prepared.
- It's another small thing, but an exceedingly nice one - there are pauses written into the main quest in which you're told to go out and do some adventuring, without guilt that you're playing around as the world collapses around you. In Skyrim's main quest, I never felt like that was the case. I was always chasing after one dragon or another, struggling to avert the crisis, but unable to just relax and explore this world that was made to be explored.
- Art design. The graphics may be dated but that doesn't mean that they don't have their own beauty or that they aren't sometimes breathtakingly amazing. When you can get views like this even without a graphics extender, who's complaining?
A lot of the character designs are very cool too and all have quite a unique flavor.
- But most of all, the one reason that you should absolutely get it is for the writing. The characters are deep and complex. When one who's been helping you along the entire time and truly cares about you leaves the stage, it's genuinely sad and touching. Right and wrong is something that you have to figure out for yourself at every turn. Entering the world of Morrowind is something that involves diving into a deep conspiracy and unraveling the truth behind thousand-year-old lies, tangling in the affairs of the gods. There's exciting and unexpected twists that serve to make the main conflict more personal than it ever was in Skyrim. And no shortage at all of rousing "Oh pl***!" moments.