A better way of putting it I think is that what is dated distracts pretty heavily from what isn't at this point.

The core combat mechanics are terrible. A lot of the game systems are very primitive. And it looks terrible by modern standards.

On the other hand, the story is still, I think, quite a bit better than Skyrim, though there are a couple of points where the padding becomes more apparent than in Skyrim. The characters are more memorable, the world is more developed, etc.

Hell, the story of Skyrim in many ways is the story of Morrowind. There are huge parallels - cultural imperialism, tense alliances, the old religion and the new. And I think Morrowind handled virtually every one of those issues with much more nuance than Skyrim does.

The main thing that makes Morrowind for me is how much effort went into immersion. Skyrim feels like they largely built a game with certain game systems and then built a story and world around it. The map feels like a bunch of little theme park attractions designed just for you, primed just waiting for you to show up for events to be set in motion.

Morrowind doesn't feel like that at all. Morrowind feels like the world is going on and you just sort of stepped into it. People don't treat you as special at all until you prove that you are useful to them. I'm not saying Skyrim has none of that, but it doesn't come close to the degree that Morrowind emphasized it.

Far less of the game is comprised of special scripted sequences or the seemingly endless dungeons of Skyrim for instance. One of the early quests you receive is to go get a key from someone. There isn't a scripted sequence here, there isn't some special way of doing it: The key is in his inventory. Go get it. The game engine gives you ways to get keys out of people's inventories (kill them, pickpocket them, and in this case you can use speechcraft to convince him to hand it over too).

Compare Skyrim, where your first thieves guild mission involves a scripted sequence where a guy distracts everyone so you can break into a lockbox without being detected.

Morrowind is a game where meeting a living god is treated incredibly soberly. There are no angelic choirs or voices in your head or anything - nothing special at all, just a weird-looking NPC to talk to at the top of a fairly impressive building.

Or take what I think to be the best example: fast travel. In Skyrim, you just click somewhere on the map. Even if you mod it to take out that fast travel and expand the carriage system, it's still extremely simple. In Morrowind, every city with a boat went to certain other cities, the cities with mages guilds offered transportation, silt striders went along certain routes, the spell Almsivi Intervention took you to the nearest Tribunal temple and Divine Intervention took you to the nearest Imperial Cult shrine. This might have been less convenient, but you ended up learning most of the routes pretty quickly and what that meant is that you unlocked fast travel by learning, much like how you learn a public transit system in real life. And you learned about the world by learning that - I still know where all of the mages guilds are in Morrowind, where ship routes will and won't go, which cities have Tribunal temples and where the Imperial Cult has footholds, etc. And remote areas actaully seemed remote - you didn't just trek there once and that was it. When you went into the Ashlands, you really felt like you were way out there.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to get to any of that anymore because the presentation is so dated and the combat is so clunky.