Oh dear.
Not really. Dark elves are not evil, for example. Their divinity system is not merely a rehash of romanticized paganism. They took that, twisted it and made it something new.
They made it something else. 'New' is too favourable of a word that under scrutiny ends up a fair bit too ambiguous for use in that context as what is new is usually a matter of personal experience, and I found Morrowind to be nothing but basic fantasy and from here we can only confuse ourselves.
The notion that Dark Elves are not evil is moot. Dark Elf is just a name and claiming originality (not a word you used but stick with me here) is to define by your own preconceptions. It comes down to what you do with what you made, and yes I did not finish the game, don't remember it much to be honest (which is not a good sign for any story), but when I played it I read everything I could read inside of the game and all I got was that there was a load of ancient stuff that is generally a problem. Are we really going to argue for Morrowind being a particular in the agglomeration of Fantasy RPG's?
The dwemer played a central role to the main quest's back story. That you think they "never really did anything" with them tells me more about how little you actually played the game.
Retrospectively they did something, but not actually.
None of the games had much chance to explore them since all but Arena took place in someone else's land, and Arena didn't really expand much on anything, it was just an open world dungeon crawler.
Of course, but that doesn't mean you have to entirely ignore the fact.
Spells, alchemy, enchanting, melee combat, ranged combat, sneaking, social interaction (though the latter was sorely lacking, even compared to a small, simplistic game like Fallout). The first three in particular had a staggering array of complexity, with dozens of effects and combinations.
Heavy blade is useful if you want a melee character, but enchant is by far the best and easiest weapon to use. In terms of pure efficiency it blows everything else out of the water. Long blade is a mid-tier combat ability, like marksmanship. I almost always went with medium armor, because the ebony mail is the best armor in the game and because heavy armor drags me down too much in the early game. And no magic = huge headaches. Magic is very useful, even to a melee character, because you still need it to bypass locks, fly and teleport. The tedium grows exponentially without it.
As for race, High Elves were hands down the best race in the game. There is no point in taking any sign other than atronach, so that plugged half their weakness. The rest is taken care of by absorb magic enchantments. Dark Elves...
I never did get into spells, the non-regenerating magicka was a bother I was repeatedly unwilling to surmount, but melee and ranged had little implication. Different melee weapons didn't matter, and anything but Long Blade was little but a fancy since, as I recall, long blades were the most common weapons, it could all work mind you but it didn't really matter what melee weapon you took. Ranged quickly turned to melee so that was that. Alchemy was as messy as it was in Oblivion, doable but ridiculously simple yet strenuously time-consuming and requiring a great deal of personal knowledge. You make enchanting sound like its broken. A dozen is not a lot, and you really need to look up the word 'array'. Suppose what I am getting at is that complexity is surely a bit too generous of a word.
The problem with the RPG system of Morrowind is that it seems you could do with being good at anything, hence the use of magic because it can cover all areas. The last choices after that is just sneaking or not sneaking and bow or melee or both. The system lends itself to exploit, you'll have to play the game a great deal or read a faq to know that High Elf is hands down the best race, that all but the atronach is wishy washy and that the ebony mail is the best armour, the fact that there is one greatest way to play the game is not to its favour, being an RPG, and it is an even worse sign when knowledge of the games system is to combat the exponential growth of tedium.
The most important part of a game is actually playing it, not the last five minutes. To get a different ending in Fallout other than the combat master race one requires you to put up with inane dialogue, a weak, laughable plot and considerable angst, all so you can talk the master into killing himself instead of just blowing his brains out. Morrowind's skill system is perfect for people who like to play, experiment and interact with a world big enough (both in size and depth) to make such experimentation meaningful. Coming up with new spells, new tactics to tackle obstacles, and new ways to break the game is a vastly superior experience to Gears of Fallout, and if I have to trade multiple endings for a vastly superior game the other 99% of the time, then so be it.
Of course all that is lovely, but not in all games and many have done it better than Morrowind (see Daggerfall), if it at all did any of the things you mention because I could not catch wind of them and I gave that game so many chances I sicken myself.
The RPG system of Morrowind cannot even relate to basic logic, Spear skill relates to endurance, Lockpicking to intelligence (but is raised by practice and not study), Short Blade is different from Long Blade but Long Blade includes the Claymore--can't even get the basic theory right.
Fallout:
Outdoorsman, linked to endurance and intelligence, lowers the chance of random encounters. Intellect makes sense somewhat, presumably you're good at picking up tracks of people or animals who frequent an area and stay out of the way, but endurance? Wouldn't perception make more sense?
Throwing, linked to agility.
Big guns, linked to agility. Actually guns in general, linked to agility. Other than pulling the trigger really fast (which has virtually no effect on automatic or single shot weapons) agility has jack fuck to do with firing a weapon.
It's pretty easy to nitpick shit like that because very few games have a wide enough variety to cover everything. Morrowind fucked up by having both speed and agility as attributes, even though the words mean the same fucking thing. But Fallout has fewer attributes, and could desperately use dexterity since a lot of their skills make no fucking sense where they are. At least TES tried, Fallout just wanted to spell out "special" which is certainly one word that comes to mind when I think of its designers.
Fair enough.
The type of story Morrowind tells is that of the epic, chosen one, climactic malarky.
It appears that way, to next gen consoletards who don't really dig deep or pay attention to it.
What chosen one? From the very first lines you see in the game, whether you really are a "Chosen One" or just someone who accomplished what he did through your own will is left ambiguous.
“Each event is preceded by Prophecy.
But without the hero,
there is no Event."
-Zurin Arctus | the Underking
The player is used from the beginning, by the Emperor, by Vivec, by Azura, because he conveniently fits and also because he is clearly capable of carrying it through. I mean, there's a fucking cave full of failed nerevarines. One would think that if it was "obviously" a chosen one story, there wouldn't be any failures.
It has in-depth background (which takes reading, so I can see how you missed it). It has multiple actors that blend so well into it most people likely don't even realize they're being manipulated. It has an antagonist who's not built up as a super-genius that ends up being too fucking stupid to realize his plan would lead to the extinction of the people he's trying to save.
What the fuck is Morrowind about?
The conflict between freedom/free will versus pre-destination and a proper role in all things. Both sides are explored form their perspectives.
You have the player who usually does whatever he is told. Is he free or just a puppet on the strings of others? He player can also "prove" he is free by bypassing the normal Nerevarine process and taking Dagoth Ur out anyway without fulfilling the prophecy.
The Dwemer, who you claim they never "did anything with" are in fact very relevant to the conflict as they attempted to control a power they were not entitled to control and vanished as a result.
Azura and the Box is a pretty good exposition of the Dwemer way of thought that led to their ruin, and it doesn't explicitly tell you or tie it in with the plot, it's something you have to deduce on your own.
The "Read a Novel" style, as you call it, conversation is really just a choice list of what exposition you want to read first. Probably one of the worst conversation systems I have ever seen for bringing life to character.
Its purpose is not to "bring a character to life", it's to teach you about the world. It is highly abstract and not the sort of thing you are likely to enjoy if you're not the type who wears a monocle and holds a tea cup with no more than two fingers. Characters are not "brought to life" by talking to them like in a bioware dating sim. They are brought to life through their actions which become more and more meaningful as you get deeper and deeper into the game.
I can't truly argue the story, never did finish the game, but I am glad there seems to be one. I suppose if you prefer reading exposition to dialogue then we may be of different breeds. To reiterate, I read every piece of anything I could get a hold of in Morrowind just to find anything at all to give a toss about but I'm afraid it was to no avail, I just couldn't care no matter how long I tried because it is just exposition and back story, the entire game takes place in back story. I can't recall anyone but the player ever really doing anything, they all just stood around and told you what you yourself could do. They did not speak through their actions, neither did they speak through speaking, they spoke through exposition: the most unimaginative narrative device known to western man.
It does seem the story of Morrowind is that of the faux chosen one, see Arcanum for how its done properly.
I was not bored with either, and Morrowind is my most played game of all time. I can't give you much to work with because you seem to know next to nothing about Morrowind. It's obvious you did not enjoy the game and did not put in the effort necessary to genuinely understand its story and world, and there's little I can do about that.
I can remember very little, all that expositional noise did not stick with me; then again, I'm a reader. Bill Hicks joke there I believe, of all things. I must have clocked over a hundred hours trying to play Morrowind, I gave that game more of a shot than I have ever given a game I despised in all it was. I read everything, I talked to everyone, I tried to do any quest and interact with anything but that god forsaken magicka system (and if that was my demise then don't say it as it will ruin your upholstery) and I got nothing out of it. My bother with Morrowind is not really the story, to claim it is about the story seems foolish to me because it is about the experience of an open world and it is in that I found Morrowind performed the worst; the world is large, you have to run around everywhere which destroys your fatigue, ruining melee combat when travelling; the RPG system does not lend itself to enough variety of play for an open-world game; there are no characters or personalities, only exposition and back story, making the world feel stale and lifeless, something that could have been amended with proper writing.
To argue the merits of Morrowind's story is to try and give pretentious meaning to it because the game does not tell a story, a story can be read about but it is not told. The sadness of this preposterous argument is that you are measuring Morrowind against Fallout and in the aspect of story of all things. Fallout tells a story, Morrowind is an open-world RPG like its predecessors and it should be compared to its predecessor as that is what it came from, and Morrowind is a dumbed down version of Daggerfall. Bethany already made Morrowind better and then, sadly, they made Morrowind.
SCO said:
People who complain about the characters in Morrowind, i suspect are actually complaining about the quests.
Not many cannibal jerky sellers who you can blackmail in Morrowind. There are quite a lot of "bring x of y to z" though, but even these are optional and unimportant (or nightmarish, like the threads of the webspinner), so they're even more bland than usual.
The quests that are worth it standout by not being classical.
To be honest, the interface doesn't help any. The few characters that have a developed "history", you have to access by the same, obfuscating, inadequate interface.
Dialog trees all the way.
I find this agreeable.