Why does every generation of modders deem it necessary to port Morrowind over into the newest game, when the lack of pixel shaders, bloom, color correction, chunky specular maps, oversaturated lighting, plasticine facegen heads and sprite trees (these two more for OB) make it stylistically superior to Oblivion and Skyrim in every conceivable way? Is it to afford the new cohort of TES fans who jumped on the bandwagon with Skyrim to run around Vvardenfell like an idiot with gameplay that isn't even remotely extensive enough to paint the original content in a flattering light?
I guess that's how the progressive incrementalism of decline works. Some thirteen year olds pirate Morrowind, run Skywind, kill some cliff racers and brag about how they're such worldly and knowledgeable fans of the games without ever having to see what the series used to be really capable of. Morrowind isn't a perfect game by any means but it depresses me to think that the reason people complacently accept things like the fifth-grade level dialogue writing and world-building in Skyrim is because they aren't aware that a higher level of quality can be achieved.
Be completely fucking honest with yourself, the only good dialogue in Morrowind was few and far between, and the characters with it can be counted on one hand. Mistress Dratha, The Dwemer you meet in Tel Fyr, Crassius Curio, Dagoth "Motherfucking" Ur, and Vivec. The decent stuff could be counted on both hands. That other stuff and the king of Morrowind, Barenziah, Caius Cosades, and maybe Almalexia.
The strength of Morrowinds writing was never in it's dialogue writing, if you want strength in that go play Planescape, or Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines. Morrowinds strength was in world building, IE, creating a believable system of lore, philosophy, religion and government through the descriptions in texts. In that regard it's similar to the Ultima series.
Indeed, but the strength of Morrowind Dialogue is that it allowed you to obtain information. You didn't engage in dialogue with Morrowind NPCs to explore their deep personalities, start emotionally engaging romances, mend their childhood scars or whatever. You did so because you wanted something. If this something wasn't items or services, then it was information and Morrowind really let you ask around about stuff.
Skyrim's dialogue may not be excruciatingly derpy Oblivion babble, but it does not, making it worse in comparison even though it works just fine.
More than that, to call Morrowind a good game, requires a degree of non-thought that I call progressive delusionism. It's a good game if you ignore the fact that there are large stretches without anything really interesting to do or look at
By this logic no cRPG is a good game. PST? Stretches of crappy combat and running around map punctuated by laborious dialogue tree traversal. Fallout? a lot of running around maps punctuated by shitty TB combat with derpy AI and lolrandom criticals.
Wizardry 8? Running back and forth boring road areas while bumping into hordes of bandits, modai and damn bats.
Arcanum? Just Arcanum.
BG? Running around empty maps, fending off repetitive filler encounters and constantly sweeping your cursor across the screen to find ring disguised as pinecone not different from every other pinecone on the map, some dull dialogue with options that don't matter much.
Everything is shit.
because default view range is so short it restricts your vision in a completely unrealistic manner even for fog.
Meshes well with gameworld shrunk in a completely unrealistic manner. Those two work better in concert than each of them alone.
There are complete and utter gaps in balance that lend themselves to a style of play that leans heavily on exploits. To the point where you can unintentionally break the game by doing accidental things.
Not to defend shitty design, but this isn't really relevant on first playthrough and avoidable on subsequent ones.
The combat system is utterly sucky to the point where button mashing with a heavily enchanted weapon is the prime method of combat at high levels.
It is, but it has much sounder underlying design. It's easier to rebuild a crappy shack on foundations worthy of a fortress than it is to fix a fortress built on a foundations worthy of a crappy shack.
Plus, Morrowind gives you more opportunities for creative behaviour by the virtue of spellmaker alone. It also has mobility skills that can be used creatively in combat and which Skyrim lacks, and its division of weapon categories meshes better with having block skill (it only lacks 1h spears, for it to be perfect).
Control is taken away from players more often than not, in the form of a block you can't control. A dodge you can't control and a hit you can't control.
Popamolefag detected. Those actions don't take away control from you because you can still do whatever you feel like doing when they play out (as opposed to Skyrim's awesome finisher cutscenes or oblivious' cutscene paralysis). More so, releagating those actions to game logic frees up control keys at the price of depriving the player of oh-so-awesome time your block game, while some sort of to-hit mechanics beats any shitty damage scaler any day.
The dungeons in Morrowind only feel larger than skyrims because on average you have a walk back, not saying it's a bad thing, but comparing the average dungeon in Morrowind to Skyrim. You'll find they more resemble closets to Skyrim's bathrooms. That's not to say it's not without it's benefits, the spaces that are fully realized are generally realized in a slightly better way than Skyrim. The spartan look of Morrowind generally gives a better appeal than Skyrim, which can't seem to settle on desolate or epic as it's main them.
The problem isn't look, size, environmental storytelling or uniqueness (though I'd probably rate average dungeon uniqueness higher in Skyrim, top dungeon uniqueness higher in Morrowind). It's linearity. Most dungeons in Skyrim are effectively corridors, shortucut back outside at the end only makes them even more formulaic.
There is also matter of hidden unique loot.
More than that the tunnels in morrowind that are closed off generally look like actual tunnel ends rather than tunnels that have randomly collapsed.
And that's just false, unless cave-in is only a cave-in to you if it's high poly.
In essense weighing the points, skyrim comes in just under Morrowind and above Daggerfall and Oblivion in total quality, with a few explainations.
I'd put it significantly below Daggerfall which I would put slightly below Morrowind. Still, Skyrim is pretty good game and decent enough TES. Infinitely superior to turdblibvion.
Dragon fights are better than cliffracers
Nope. Cliffracers were just a filler acting like filler. They were annoying, possibly too common and arguably not the best design, but they were doing what they were supposed to.
Dragons, OTOH, are definitive epic non-filler enemies degraded to filler. They could have been more interesting if they had broader array of abilities and AI to use them effectively, but as they are, they are just heavy hitting damage sponges that can be fought in formulaic manner thanks to unnecessarily derpy AI. And they are thrown at you unnecessarily often resulting in exact same feeling you had with cliffracers, except no cliffracer ever stole several minutes of your life.
When encountering a dragon you don't think "awesome! an epic battle!", nor "shitshitshitidontwannadieshit". You think "shit, I don't have time for this". For an enemy that's supposed to be epic and awesome this is the worst fail imaginable.
or really anything Morrowind had to offer combat wise
Well, Morrowind generally failed to provide good battles at higher levels, so not a big achievement.
Still epic demoted to filler can't compare to filer being filler. At least not positively. Even when random epic enemies are a tier of their own.
In general they've come far enough that unmodded the game aesthetically looks better than Morrowind. While sometimes it confuses it's theme, Morrowind did that as well to a somewhat lesser extent(Looking at you Grazelands and West Gash).
Bwuh?
For the record, I consider both games aesthetically pleasing. Would rate Morrowind a bit higher overall on grounds of it being more alien, but that's it.
particularly if I use every tool in my arsenal rather than just burst dpsing them down.
Try playing a pure caster in MW.
And yeah, HP bloat sucks.
Imperials too. 
is... ''Buy only CoD games they're inovative...'' 
