Impressions from playing the 360 version about 6 hours today:
From the get-go, let me state that I loved Oblivion and have only played Morrowind for about 8 hours. I am in the crowd that did NOT hate the Speech minigame (although I didn't enjoy it) and did NOT mind the zooming-up-on-people's-faces thing that Oblivion did. I did dislike the repetitive dungeons, main storyline (mainly the gates), and scaling enemies.
The game is GORGEOUS. It's so pretty. While technically not Unchartamazing, the atmosphere is incredible. Leafs rustle, trees sway, rain patters, snow gusts...I could go on. No one piece is amazing, but combined it truly makes it a sight to behold. The weather effects remind me of RDR. If it rains, people stay inside, if it snows, you can't see farther than twenty feet in front of you. There was one ugly part in a cave where the wall textures looked absolutely terrible, but that was one part.
Gameplay wise, it's great. I LOVE the regenerating health/magicka. Health recovers so slowly in combat it never matters, and outside of combat it recovers fairly quickly. Makes the flow of combat seem much faster. Combat itself is largely untouched from Oblivion besides the inclusion of finishing moves which seems random. One point I think they missed out on a great opportunity was the Favorites Wheel. You can quickly swap between magic/weapons/shields/items on the fly by tapping up on the D-pad. Hit the respective trigger on what you want, boom, it's bound. HOWEVER, you can "perma-slot" a spell/item/weapon to the left or right D-pad. Great, right? Except it's not a "preset", it's a single skill. So say you have a "recovery preset" you want that has healing in one hand and a shield in the other. Can't do it. You can slot a shield to the left D-Pad and a healing spell to the right, but it's not too smart about it.
Say you want to go from Fireball in both hands to said "recovery preset", you have to hit [right D-pad], [right D-pad], [left D-pad], and to get back to your offensive preset you have to go into the Favorites menu and left and right trigger fireball again. It doesn't seem like much, but saving both hands to a left D-pad preset would have made it SO much more intuitive.
Enough about that. The music is fantastic. It teases the main theme so many times I'm like "COME ON", but in a good way. City themes seem unique, battle themes swoop in and out with combat (except the music still gives away when there's an ambusher nearby, DOH!), it's just splendidly done.
It's Oblivion without the crappy stuff from Oblivion. Rare items, involving quests, a main quest that doesn't suck, crafting that matters, character building decisions that matter, DRAGONS (which, by the way, are hard as balls)...it's great. Oh, and did I mention the music makes me well up with mantears? Because it does. I'm enjoying this more than I enjoyed Oblivion, and Oblivion is my fourth favorite game of all time.
More than willing to answer a few questions about specifics. I. Love. This. Game.
Grotte immer früher.
