Then Morrowind is the least walking-simmy of the more recent TES games. It is the only one of them that has actual gameplay grafted into the overworld exploration through survival mechanics whose value Bethesda forgot about and has only recently started to rediscover (let alone build up on). It is a game that requires resource management and where the overworld encounters are more lethal and harder to flee.
I didn't powergame my character at all in Morrowind (aside from making a character who would start out with the greatest amount of accuracy) and I didn't notice any of this stuff. I just played naturally and took things as they went. As I mentioned
years ago there was only one fight that gave me any trouble.
(also Morrowind's dungeons were totally linear and samey, VD's review brought this up while mentioning how Oblivion's were better even if they still weren't Daggerfall-level)
I wasn't trying to argue that the combat or the dungeons were challenging, but rather that there were actual mechanics to the exploration, which means it is inaccurate to describe the game as a "walking sim", and even if one grants that it isn't, Skyrim and Oblivion are even worse in this regard.
Playing blind with no metagaming you have to mind things like armor durability, non-regenerating health and magicka, the fact that you can't fast travel, etc. That means that at least
some thought has to go into the process of traversing the world. That means a lot for a franchise that has had overworld exploration as their
de facto selling point since MW.
It might not be much, but the sad fact is that the state of the art in overworld exploration in RPGs has never been very advanced mechanically-speaking. There have been some pioneers like Might and Magic and TES, but this aspect of RPG gameplay is in most cases very barebones compared to, say, dungeon exploration, and turn-based tactical combat.
One way overworld exploration can be made interesting is through survival mechanics: resource and risk management, plus world lethality through both traps and enemies(that need not be powerful individually, but should meaningfully chip away at your resources as a whole). A proper itemization system that allows or emphasizes non-craftable loot can also add another mechanical aspect to said exploration, or at least connect the latter to a systemic element. A lot of these things can also be done with dungeon exploration, and in fact, good dungeon crawlers usually do them well.
Morrowind got many things right from this point of view, but the thing that held back this element of its design was poor balance: you would stop noticing a lot of this stuff by mid-game as you grew more powerful and it became trivial, even without powergaming.
Still, I am cautiously optimistic about the growing interest Bethesda has shown in survival mechanics, as it makes it more likely that their next game will actually add more mechanical layers to exploration rather than remove them, as they have been doing since Oblivion.
Just to be clear, I was, and still am, only addressing overworld exploration in Morrowind( and TES broadly), instead of dungeon exploration. The latter I consider a distinct area and one in which TES games have never been particularly good, especially compared to games that actually specialize on that, such as Wizardry-style crawlers, for example.The reason for that is that I think that the "walking sim" charge often surfaces in discussion of these games due to their being centered on overworld-exploration, while not being particularly notable in other areas, such as combat, and overworld exploration often feels like a very empty mechanic(if one considers it one at all), especially when stripped of the elements mentioned above.
I put almost 80 hours of my youth into oblivion - unpatched on a ps3 haha. So I now really need to play it again but I cannot stand the lvl scaling.
