I'm playing through all the Elder Scrolls games - including Battlespire and the fantastic Redguard - for the millionth time, and I feel like I enjoy Morrowind less every time I return to it, which isn't the case for the other games in the series. Everything's so static and unreactive, and the quests are almost uniformly straightforward, linear, and conceptually boring. People rightly mock Todd for every other Skyrim quest being ridiculous and melodramatic, but Morrowind has the inverse problem of everything being dull as hell. It creates a sense of place better than any other game in the series, but you can't actually do anything in that place, beyond a set of trivial tasks - mostly fetch quests - given to you by a handful of NPCs. I thought I'd shake things up by killing the proprietor of the House of Earthly Delights, and the dancers just kept dancing as I tore chunks out of their boss. Then one of them told me to talk to her boss if I wanted a job there, with said boss lying dead in front of her. There's not even a token reaction to your actions, like there is in Daggerfall (walk into Mynisera's chamber in Castle Daggerfall and all the guards start massing in on you, for example).
There's like zero reactivity to anything the player does. Big Helende wants me to steal the Dispel Potion recipe. I go to ask the store owner and she says she'll NEVER give her secret potion formula away to anyone! I walk upstairs in full view of her and the guard, open her personal drawers, take the formula, and walk out. The fuck was the point of this quest? You literally can't fail it or influence its outcome in any way. The quest is to go to a shop and walk up the stairs. Same for the grand ebony staff heist, which Helende says is SO DANGEROUS that she CANNOT ASK YOU TO DO IT. Walk to the staff in question - an uneventful trip up Therena's tower - and stand behind the guy. Squat until the hidden marker comes up (I'm like 20 Sneak, so this isn't a high skill check) and then pick up the staff. The dude then turns towards me as I leave to give me a generic greeting, looks at the empty space where his staff once was, and doesn't give a flying fuck. The quest was essentially, again, to go somewhere and pick something up, and can't really be failed.
The Thieves Guild vs Fighter's Guild questline is just crying out for some reactivity but there scarcely is any - steal Sottilde's code book and bring it back to the Fighter's Guild, nobody gives much of a shit. I specifically asked Sottilde about the book, and her dialogue indicated that I'd mentioned I was sent by the Fighter's Guild, as she told me I'd have to choose where my loyalties lie. The book then goes missing one second later as I squat behind her looking like I'm trying to shit. Nobody cares about this or reacts to it afterwards, my standings with the Thieves' Guild and Fighters' Guild are both intact. The Thieves' Guild was going to use the codebook to get an edge on the Camonna Tong, but my theft of it hasn't set them back at all and isn't mentioned again.
It also genuinely is a big step down from Daggerfall in a lot of ways, though a notable step forward in a couple others. The world it creates is fantastic, but it's so empty.
