I have no idea what that means.

Me neither. :p

Check out this. :')
So cool!

Yep. Morrowind is The Best. Walking around is its own reward there.

Foor some reason, I loved the place. More modern graphics were later used to display more bland sceneries. These later games didn't make me feel as much a happy contemplative traveller as Morrowind did.

I never got Morrowind. I loved it back in the day but looking back at it, it's really aged horribly. Great characters and designs but the actual game play is so archaic and dull.

Not really. For instance there are (were ?) a lot of mods with way better looking faces with lighter textures than what vanilla gives.
But ok, it looked good (despite bad animations).
And yes it doesn't prevent the game for being great.

Somthing you may want to look into since you're new to Morrowind in general is OpenMW, an open source engine to run Morrowind. It's still in late alpha/early beta but you can run through most of the quests.

http://openmw.org/en/

In 2002 that was graphically amazing for the scale of the game.

Also, Obligatory Morrowind > Skyrim > Oblivion, too late for me to trudge up the explanation again.

uh... yeah... haha

I have to agree with darthspudius on this: the game has really aged terribly, imo, and notice that I almost never say something like this!
I remember playing the hell out of it back when it came out, and I spent way more hours than I should have on it, trying almost all the classes and completing each guild quest line.
Yet, while playing it again last year (I think around this period, too) I just found it clunky, unappealing and overall quite boring.
I think I have been spoiled by far greater similar games I played only after completing Morrowind, like Fallout (1, 2 and NV), Risen, Planescape: Torment, Ultima Underworld (yes, the 1992 one), The Witcher and even S.T.A.L.K.E.R., under a certain point of view.
They all have aged much, much better, imo.

I still think that Morrowind has one of the most awesome settings ever presented in a videogame, and I recognize that it had a lot of excellent ideas (see the whole Sixth House matter, the immense and coherent lore, the believable factions), it pushed you to explore the world rewarding you with rare special objects (not like in Oblivion, where you could get them only after being the lackey of the Daredric princes) it had a good “speechcraft” system and a serious stronghold contruction, yet the gameplay is incredibly shallow: the combat basically consists in charge hit-release hit-cast spell and hope it works, each ability is either completely useless at low levels or god-like at higher ones (like my mage who almost couldn't move at level 1 with no load but could beat the speed world record after a while, packing heavy armour), the whole crafting aspect is basically useless, there are no real reactions from opposed factions beside the preclusion of the other Great Houses you didn't choose (really, you could even join both the Mages Guild and House Telvanni... and some of the later missions of a guild implied the assassination of the masters of the other! Then what about the Imperal Cult and and the Tribunal Temple? It would be like being both a djihadist and a crusader!), and the dungeons are composed by more or less 10 pieces recombined in different orders.
Also, the writing... ugh. Despite the strong substance of the peculiar storyline and the lore, they are written worse than a 3rd grade student could, and the interactions with any character aside from those few needed for the main quests are either ridiculous or almost non-existent. Really, I think you can't get much worse than Bethesda for what concerns dialogues, and with each new game this just got worse and worse.

Does the draw distance have anything to do with Framerate? I upped it and all of a sudden it seems a tad choppy

It's true in my opinion. What Morrowind did over the other two more than the others was give you freedom and immersion. Yes the combat system is problematic, yes the leveling system takes getting used to, yes there's bugs and glitches, but I'll point this out from my perspective: Three moments that had the most impact on me in the three games.

For Skyrim, it was killing my first dragon, killing the Lich King, and successfully sleuthing my way through a honey producer's mansion and out without getting caught.

For Oblivon: It was being forced to kill my own Allies of the Dark Brotherhood, the long and arduous theft of an Elder Scroll while managing to keep from utterly destroy the boots I was told I needed to survive, and my first trek into an Oblivion Gate.

For Morrowind: My first steps off the boat in Syda Neen, my first night in Balmora stopping and looking up to see the twin moons in the sky, and my Pilgrimage to Vivec from Balmora, helping a traveler along the way and discovering the floating asteroid stuck in time above the city.

You see what the differences are? Oblivion and Skyrim were impressive yes, but they relied on the combat, they relied on intense moments to engage you, they start you out with a purpose and a quest and a meaning and an enemy before you ever gained your freedom in the world. Morrowind, didn't have to do that. The environment engaged you, the world engaged you, every unique detail and facet of its world was a story in itself and up to you to discover it. And it did it so much more naturally than the other two. You were given nothing but a letter, a name and the contents of a barrel (And in that barrel, two quests and a story to discover). You didn't need big action set pieces, they put a world in front of you and said "You can go anywhere your feet will carry you". That alone makes it far more powerful than Oblivion and Skyrim. And to look at a game as impressive, you can't merely look at them from a modern perspective. To truely appreciate them you have to see them for the time they were made. Was Skyrim an amazing feat for its time? Was Oblivion a trend setter for it's time? Morrowind was game of the year, and one of the most amazing and engaging experiences of all time at its release, and that's why it will always stay with me.

Well, it wasn't THAT beautiful, but each region really had a very cool mood, which made exploring the island quite visually rewarding. Travelling in the mountains during a ash storm, trying to cross the southern rocky coast to get to that strange statue indicated on the map, finding a mountain pass between the green pastures of Balmora and the sinister swamps of the west coast, contemplating the sheer scale of Vivec, discovering cities created inside giant crabs or on tops of giant mushrooms... It was a travel to another land, all game long. Maybe not eyecandy, but certainly eyespice :)

And yes, it's one of my favorite of all time, why do you ask? ^^

Oh, I don't dispute (and I won't ever) the magnificence of Morrowind's environment. But it didn't achieve that with high fidelity realistic textures (which is my understanding of 'breathtaking graphics'), on the contrary it is because of the surrealistic atmosphere (which was later ruined in Oblivion with generic medievalry and stupid bloom).
Fair enough. But for the sake of criticizing the technical aspect independently from the scale of the game, some visual aspects could've been way better without ruining performance even more ('faces' and 'bodies' weren't good at all, animations too but that's kind of bethesda's trademark).

That's aligned with my thoughts, given that I didn't actually played Skyrim, just saw people play it a little (I'll admit that Humanly footed khajiits put me off, even if that brands me as a cats' paws fetichist).

Just to add my 2ps worth to this:
For Skyrim, it was killing my first dragon, killing the Lich King, and successfully sleuthing my way through a honey producer's mansion and out without getting caught.
- I found this one to be the most boring of the whole ES series. Pointless main quest which seemed to last 20mins, however this was inherent from Oblivion. Also this one needs virtually re-building with mods to make it look anything more than a PS1 port.

For Oblivon: It was being forced to kill my own Allies of the Dark Brotherhood, the long and arduous theft of an Elder Scroll while managing to keep from utterly destroy the boots I was told I needed to survive, and my first trek into an Oblivion Gate.
- The Dark brotherhood quest line was one of the best, the mansion murder part was well done, could have been deeper though. Again, needs heavy modding to be anything like a decent game.

For Morrowind: My first steps off the boat in Syda Neen, my first night in Balmora stopping and looking up to see the twin moons in the sky, and my Pilgrimage to Vivec from Balmora, helping a traveler along the way and discovering the floating asteroid stuck in time above the city.
- Ah yes, on the boat. And the mage landing in the road in front of you. Graphically poor, and some of the armor looks ridiculous (yes, glass armor, that sounds protective). I remember investing heavily in lock picking to get to 100, then picked the palace door and *dun dun dun* nothing there.

So Morrowind was a more complete game, and at the time graphics were ok. The other ones, well it seems like Beths decided to make an engine and let the fans build the games.