As I mentioned previously, I've been playing through Morrowind. My goal was to become the head of every possible faction before I began the main quest. Completing this goal has left my character as the head of the Fighters Guild, Mages Guild, Theives Guild, Imperial Cult, Tribunal Temple, (local branch of the) East Empire Company, Imperial Legion, and House Telvanni. If UESP is to be believed, I may yet also become the head of house Hlaalu. Performing all of these quests has made doing the Main Quest terribly easy. I essentially just run (jumping run actually because it is faster) across the overworld from one mission to the next. Even with leveled enemies, I have equipment broken enough to strike down most foes that aren't immune to magic in two to three hits. It look me maybe an hour to do half the quests in the main quest and that's because I wasn't making proper use of Mark/Recall to set up portals to go immediately back to quest givers.

I do think that I've finally figured out why I couldn't understand (and thus disliked) Morrowind when I attempted to play it several times in college. It seems as though the game drops you in the wrong place with insufficient direction. Firstly, you're dropped in a city that has none of the major factions in the game and in which there are few, if any, worthwhile quests. Secondly, although the game tells you to "Go to Balmora", it gives very little indication of how to do such a thing and doesn't really provide the equipment to do it successfully. Oblivion manages to fix this by providing a (Patrick Stewart narrated) tutorial and drops you into a major city where most factions are represented. I probably wouldn't have had any chance at playing through Morrowind unless I had previously played through Oblivion.

One other side note with respect to Tom's talk of "breaking the game" at the 004 show, I saw no need to break the game money wise (his information on Skill leveling was very helpful, but not game breaking in my opinion). Just doing some mild heuristics on picking up random drops (my heuristic is to pick up anything with value/weight >= 20) caused me to have 130k of money by the time I started the Main Quest plus enough random, high-value loot to purchase anything else in the game as a 1 for 1 swap.

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