I was going to say something like, "you owe it to yourself to play this game." But my parent's generation said the same thing to me about CRPGs like Planescape: Torment, and as a working adult, I never had the time to figure out their convoluted gameplay systems.
So more realistically, give Morrowind to your children. Figure out how to install it, get a character to Balmora to make sure it doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and let them go nuts.
Vvardenfell is a strange land which rewards curiosity, and it doesn't have any ads.
Wasn't that released just three years prior? How old are your parents?
What do you mean? Planescapes gameplay is pretty much the same as all party based RPGs, many modern ones are pretty similar as well, Pathfinder, Divinity, pillars of eternity...
The problem is how well does Planescape Torment work as an introduction for someone who never played any of the games you listed? A few weeks ago I was talking with some younger coworkers about new games and they came up blank when I mentioned Baldurs Gate III, any game related to it and even several out of your list. Planescape Torment is part of a genre of games many never played.
Then the ash storms started. I needed shelter quickly, so dived into some nearby Dwemer ruins.
But it was infested with vampires. They hadn't detected me, but were close enough that I couldn't rest, and I wasn't strong enough to defeat them.
So I sat there in the ruins, listening to the ash storm howl outside, for an hour, until it died down.
After I finished my journey, days alone in the ash wastes, with only ash storms and danger for company had gotten to me, so I had to take a break from Morrowind. That damn howl, that sound was perfectly oppressive.
TL;DR - I'd never had a game affect me like that before, and the capacity to wander into stuff you totally can't handle made the world and its danger feel more real.
That's why anytime I played Oblivion or Skyrim, I installed mods to disable creature leveling (creatures got tougher or weaker, contingent on your level).
I like a game where eventually goblins become a non-threat I vapourise with one swing of Goldbrand, but powerful vampire mages can still turn me into paste with a few gestures.
Many people would argue that the complexity of 3.5e isn't really worth going back to because a 5e game just flows better
BOO! BOO!
Speaking of “introductory guides for modern gamers”, there definitely should be one that lists most common ways they unwittingly mutilate the old games.
Mistake #1 is, without doubt, using high resolution uncommon at the production period for rendering. So they start the game, then feel it looks a bit shitty (it really is, now when you set it that way), then turn to mods, HD skins, NN-upscaled textures, and other craptastic “enchancements”. If step 0 was wrong, don't try to fix it with further wrong steps. Screen resolution, texture resolution, model complexity, artistic style, etc. should all be in balance. If you want a game that looks good in FullHD, you need to gather a new team that remakes the whole thing from scratch (and that production is going to cost more than the original one).
Mistake #2 is increasing view distance for the sole reason that hardware allows you to do it. Virtual horizon is really important to set scale for the game world. If it's too far, the exciting travel to the unknown place turns into moving to a next stand in theme park, or the wide plane turns into the small crossroad with NPCs standing here and there who don't even need to shout to hear each other.
These changes are as drastic as giving rocket launcher to the player, but everyone is so used to them that they don't realize what is wrong. Some people even make “retro” games assuming this is how games looked like originally.
I see your point and you're not wrong, but people have different priorities and playing video games is a hugely subjective experience anyway. Yes, adding a sentence or two about how the game may not look and feel as intended could be a nice idea. But it's not _wrong_ to change it, if that's what you prefer.
I've played Morrowind vanilla and with loads of mods (including graphical improvements) and I honestly liked the modded one better. Just personal preference.
Look at some examples:
https://vintage3d.org/gallery/vt4.php
Rough pixels, rough edges, rough effects, everything is more or less balanced. On the contrary, when you streeeeeeeeetch the same 64×64 texture onto a single polygon covering half of your giant screen, then blend it with pixel-perfect light gradient, it won't ever look good. But a lot of people today call the monstrosity they see on screen in high res a “vanilla look”, and even reason about its visual quality.
Morrowind was made in later era, and was less resolution-dependent, as there was a range of accelerators of varying performance to run on. Still, its user interface makes it clear that playing in resolutions higher than commonly available at the time was not really considered. Many other games simply crash or develop bugs at high resolutions because they weren't even tested with those (or it was simply impossible with contemporary consumer hardware). When people release “fixes” for that, they don't question themselves whether everything that is possible to do should really be done.
Game makers had some top hardware configuration in mind as a performance and quality reference. In simple terms, the beefiest machine in the studio set the gold standard for the look of the game. I would advise against setting game resolution higher than that for '90s and significant part of 2000s games to see the game the way it was meant to be seen (visuals produced in modern shader graphics era are much less dependent on rendering resolution if they aren't constructed in a hacky way).
I feel only Dune and Star Wars have been so visually distinctive for me.
However, I read many good thing on the original Morrowind game so I do intend to play it some time.
So it was both pretty sad, but also quite diverse and exciting graphically. It is setup to start with a lot of hardship and an unfriendly population, which gradually changes as you learn more about them and establish your place in Dunmer society (if you choose to - you can become a vampire).
Having played Skyrim and Oblivion, I don't think they come close to the deep lore there is Morrowind and they do seem to recycle the same books.
Morrowind is much more about exploring the setting than an action RPG like the following titles.
I’ve recently been playing Julius, a reimplementation of Caesar III; and Augustus, a form with extra features:
https://github.com/bvschaik/julius https://github.com/Keriew/augustus
Both of those open reimplementations require the base game, which is very very cheap on gog.com. I'd really recommend it.
With small children, full time work, etc, I haven't found a way to make that happen.
Do I wait until retirement or is there some other trick to it?
https://github.com/Sigourn/nerevarrising
It's basically vanilla plus. Not only did I have a fun following the guide, I feel like I'm getting a very authentic experience. One day I'll experiment more with OpenMW (especially once it reaches modding parity), but for today I'm enjoying the real thing.
If you want to keep vanilla mechanics (mostly), then OpenMW has already had modding parity for at least several years. In fact, OpenMW is already mostly working on enhancements and performance improvements rather than stability and feature parity with the original engine.
AFAIK, they have their own modding guide, which is pretty extensive, and the minority of mods that aren't compatible are just those which are obsolete (not updated since 2004-5) or superceded by other, better mods, anyways.
