After jumping back in to play a few hours of Skyrim I felt magnetized as usual to go back into Morrowind. I love Morrowind and have a great time even today just starting a character on a basically vanilla game (I do use OpenMW for upscaling/running higher resolution) and with that in mind I think this game is still so beautiful. It has such an incredible atmosphere and I love just about everything about it, even the hit chance! I love how spell effects can be used to make the sort of character you want or give you the traversal options you need. Maybe the base character models could use some upgrading, but I'm sure there's a mod for that - but honestly I don't even care. Something about this world always draws me back even 20 years later. I hope Skyrim is the same way in the long run, but it's much more difficult to start a game and drop right in. At least with Oblivion I could save a character right at the Sewer exit gate and reconfigure him and have the similar "Morrowind" feeling of a quick start up. Skyrim doesn't give that option and you have to run through that long sequence again and it kills a lot of my vibe before I even get started, not to mention the way skills are handled in that game and reduced even further than Oblivion.
I love that the heavy handed scaling isn't present in Morrowind - you start off rough and really do feel that increase in power every step of the way. It's a tough act to follow.