and nuanced thoughts from a recent Morrowind addict (tl;dr):
Morrowind has the probably best world building I've ever seen in a videogame. I'd put it above Ultima and Arcanum and on par with Fallout. Is it a bad RPG? In a lost of ways, yes. I've been playing it non-stop for the last month and I keep getting reminded of how much better a game Gothic (which came out around the same time) is, yet... Gothic didn't pull me in like this.
To complicate matters, there's mods, an infinity of them. There's even one that's larger than the base game(I haven't played it yet). They smooth over many of the game's flaws and bring it much closer to original vision, which is expressed in the game's lore and the concept art left by Michael Kirkbride. I can't remember a game where the perusal of the conceptual material is so central to the appreciation of the game. The people who say you can abstract the videogame from extraneous material like the cover art, the manual, the maps, etc. are wrong. At the very least, it's wrong for the RPG genre.
Basically, there's a base game you may enjoy as a neutral consumer of videogames and there's another videogame hidden underneath that reveals itself when you get into the lore, start fiddling with mods and looking attentively at the concept art. But this videogame may never reveal itself to you, first because such things don't have to happen, and second because the base game does a lot to repel the player, particularly the CRPG veteran.
I remember when I first played it many years ago. I made a character in Seyda Neen, ran around for a bit and laughed at the derpy looking Bethesda NPCs with the Wiki style conversation. Explored a little... ok, shitty combat and the dungeons look uninteresting (you go through a conspicuous door and get teleported to a different cell, Gothic is much more seamless). I got ambushed by the Dark Brotherhood while resting and barely defeated the assassin by standing still and swinging my sword really fast. Stupid and random. I also got some phat loot which broke the early economy. Isn't this typical Bethesda, I thought? Shortly after I uninstalled the game.
Many years later, in 2023, because I really like the Lizardman race in Master of Magic, I started wondering what games let you play as an amphibious lizard (I still have the thoughts of a 12 year old, despite being over 30). Not a lot came up, but there was Morrowind. And they used spears too, just like in those sketches from the Fighting Fantasy books I used to play. Well, it turned out that when you go into it with an idea of a character that actually fits the pre-existing lore the experience is completely different. My stealthy Argonian warrior found pearls on the seabeds, explored underwater caves and sunken ships, and used speed and the spear's reach to keep enemies at bay. I was basically playing a canonical Marsh hunter without knowing it, and through that perspective the world opened itself to me. The intricacies of Morrowind society, the nuance with which it treated enslavement of the beast races, the different ideologies of the Dunmer clans, their relation to the empire, etc. The aesthetics drew me in more and more. I come upon the name of Kirkbride. Wow, I'm starting to get it.
Then came the mods. I'm quite familiar with New Vegas modding, so it didn't take long to learn how to use the Construction Set. And for every gripe I had with the game, there seemed to be a mod for it on Nexus. It's like the game is begging you to rebuild it. Is this part of Bethesda's winning formula? For better and worse.
So I get it why some people hate Morrowind. I'd probably hate it too if I'd played it in 2002, coming off Gothic, and saw its explosion in popularity. But for strange reasons I'm now quite addicted to it. There's a really good RPG in there wanting to come out, you just have to go in there and lend it a hand. Then you learn to love it and ignore some of its flaws which mods can't fix. What else can you do, there's nothing else like Morrowind.