Patient Gamers

You should play Morrowind! We've got:

• A handcrafted, in depth alien world to explore with surprises literally around every corner
• divine apotheosis disease that turns you into a zombie shambler
• catgirl booba
• self-appointed divinity and all around man of mystery Vivec whose main claim to fame is that he canonically, as an in-game Elder Scrolls character, managed to access the Elder Scrolls Construction Set and assign himself the 'deity=true' variable
• The Pain Glove (TM)
• Furry fulfillment fantasy where you can become a big buff wolfman and run off into the wilderness
• Wizard fulfillment fantasy where you can rack up all your stats into the millions by abusing loopholes in magic research, and then craft the potion seller's strongest potions concentrated to a point that they could knock out God
• "I cast Everyone In This Town Dies Instantly"
• being sexually propositioned by a Daedra
• being sexually propositioned in order to recieve a promotion
• leaping sixty miles in a single mighty bound and then splattering yourself across a rock face in one shot because you forgot to account for landing your mighty leap
• Selling swords to a crab
• selling a merchant an enchanted shirt of "Fire Damage 1pt per second, constant effect" and then waiting for him to keel over dead so you can loot his store with impunity
• an entire province full of rogue wizards where "I'd like to see you stop me" is the whole of the law
• dream daddy Dagoth and his castle-stomping giant robot
• caves made out of meat
• trying to fight the luckiest man of all time and being literally unable to land a hit on him without abusing the actual fabric of reality
• The Boots Of Barry Allen
• "That's a good argument. Unfortunately," Weakness to Magic 100%, 10 seconds. Weakness to Fire 100%, 10 seconds. Fire Damage 100pts, 10 seconds.
• lockpicking your way inside the government treasury and making off with all the contents
• The Corpse of Peke Utchoo
• "Listen, this is very important. I need you to stab me in the face."
• 'mines' full of bugs where the 'miners' harvest the bug eggs in order to eat and sell (this is the primary food source of the region)
• smuggling Dwarven artifacts
• smuggling drugs
• radical abolitionists as a joinable faction
• lizard people
• "Yeah so, to complete this pilgrimage you need to go drown yourself in the sewers. God says so."
• the joys of property ownership
• having enough strength score that you hit someone once with a longsword and the weapon instantly shatters in your hands, but it's okay because their entire skeleton exploded
• having 100% magic resistance and watching enemy spells just ping off of your shiny pecs with zero effect
• skill trainers that are sometimes actively hostile to you. The greatest enchanter in the land is a daedra worshipper that lives in an old Dunmer stronghold. He ain't gonna be happy to meet you. You want to learn his secrets? Do something about that.

....and more. This is just what I pulled off the top of my head in 20 minutes of thinking about it. I love this game, it's peak elder scrolls in my opinion and nearly peak early-2000's gaming in general.

It's a little crusty though. I grew up playing it so I can deal, but the modern gamer is going to struggle a bit. I'm going to give you some tips for the most common complaints.

"The combat sucks! I can't hit anything!"

The combat is roll based, like D&D. You wouldn't expect your D&D wizard to competently cleave someone head to asshole with a greatsword, and you shouldn't expect your Nerevarine to do it either with 30 AGI and 40 Long Blade. Chance to hit is determined by Agility score and weapon skill, and damage is determined by strength score and weapon skill. Make your AGI nice and high at character creation and pick a major skill weapon that you like and stick to it. Using gold to gain skill training goes a very long way towards competency in Morrowind and at low skill levels, it's cheap enough to make it a regular part of your shopping. If you find a really cool axe and you only have 5 in your Axe skill, go get some training with it before you try and take it out into real action. Failing any of that, the "Fortify Attack" effect from the Warrior birthsign or the Orc's Berserk power adds directly to your chance to hit. 10 points gives you 10% added on top after your normal to-hit calculations. Doesn't add any damage though.

By mid to late game, with relevant stats and skill levels at 70 or 80+, missing melee strikes in combat will become kind of rare, even without fortify attack boosts.

"The leveling system sucks! You have to optimize everything with meta knowledge!"

Morrowind is a hilariously unbalanced game, you definitely do not need optimal levelups to succeed. If you do want to get optimal level ups, you are going to need to perform some strange cheese using meta knowledge. But as a casual player, just making the skills you want to use your Major/Minor skills and leveling up normally as you gain experience is plenty fine, you'll be totally okay.

One caveat to that though, is that your HP total is dependent on your endurance score, and it is not retroactive. Getting your endurance high, or maxed, early in the game is usually a primary goal for most experienced players so that you get the maximum amount of HP per level up. I do recommend this. However, there are many other ways to get around this if other stats are more important to you, such as max HP boosting potions or enchantments, or just one of many ways of avoiding being hit in the first place (shield spells, flight, concealment or stealth, killing the enemy dead in one shot from 50 meters)

"I don't know where to go!"

Just read, bro. People give you directions to get places. You don't have quest markers but you do have a quest journal that will let you go back and read the exact dialogue of the quest giver whenever you want.

There are a couple of occasions where people will give you bad directions, or the place you're looking for is just hard to locate. For those, UESP exists. I've been playing this game for 20 years and sometimes I still have to look up specifics on some places, the game is that big. I've run this game probably two dozen times and I usually find at least one thing I've never seen before each time.