Marvel’s Wolverine finally has reviews attached to it, and the story those reviews are telling is not the one Insomniac probably hoped for. The combat is being praised, the performances are being praised, the cinematic presentation is being praised. But underneath all of that is a complaint that keeps surfacing again and again: the game will not leave the player alone. Skill Up went so far as to say he does not recommend it, largely because of what he described as relentless handholding, including Quick Time Events that reportedly complete themselves even if the player never presses the button. Critics who liked Wolverine as a character piece still flagged the same underlying issue, that Insomniac built a linear corridor experience with a UI seemingly designed to prevent the player from ever feeling lost, even for a moment.
That last part is the one I keep coming back to. Not lost in a bad way, lost in the way that used to be part of the appeal of playing games in the first place.
Of course, Marvel’s Wolverine is not doing anything unique here. It is just the newest and most visible example of a design philosophy that has quietly become the default across big budget action games. Waypoints that draw a line to your objective. Quest markers on quest markers. Prompts that appear to remind you which button does the thing you have already done a hundred times. Enemies who telegraph their attacks so loudly and so repeatedly that engaging your brain becomes optional. None of this is evil by itself. Accessibility matters, and plenty of these systems started as genuinely good ideas meant to widen who gets to enjoy these games. This being said, somewhere along the way a lot of studios stopped treating that kind of guidance as an option you could turn off and started treating it as the whole design philosophy.
That is exactly why I think we are seeing so many people quietly drift back toward older games, and Morrowind in particular keeps coming up in these conversations for good reason.
If you have never played The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, it is worth explaining just how differently it treats you compared to something like Marvel’s Wolverine. There is no quest marker. There is no waypoint. When an NPC gives you directions, they give them in the actual language a person would use, something like travel north past the guild hall, follow the road until it forks, take the left path toward the ashlands. You either paid attention or you did not, and if you did not, you turned around and asked someone else, or you opened your journal and pieced it together yourself. Getting lost in Vvardenfell was not a failure state. It was the game. You would set out to deliver a letter and end up three hours later in a Dwemer ruin you were never told about, fighting something you had no business fighting yet, because you took a wrong turn and decided to see where it led anyway.
That is such a foreign concept to a lot of modern AAA design that it almost sounds like a design flaw when you describe it out loud. It is not. It is trust. Morrowind trusted the player to read, to remember, to fail, and to figure things out, and that trust is precisely what made the world feel real instead of decorative. A world where every answer is one glowing marker away stops feeling like a world. It starts feeling like a checklist with good lighting.
The same trust shows up in how Morrowind builds its character system, and this is another place where the comparison to modern RPGs gets uncomfortable fast. Morrowind gives you a huge web of individually trainable skills, long blade, short blade, marksman, mysticism, alchemy, security, mercantile, and dozens more, and it expects you to actually build a character around a handful of them rather than eventually maxing out everything the way a lot of modern RPGs quietly allow. Your birthsign matters. Your race matters, mechanically, not just cosmetically. Attribute points are finite and every choice you make at character creation and every level up afterward closes off some other version of the character you could have been. Compare that to how many modern RPGs treat character building as a formality on the way to the real content, a menu you click through once so the game can get on with showing you set pieces. Of course, some modern RPGs still do this well. This being said, Morrowind’s systems reward genuine specialization in a way that makes your specific playthrough feel like yours, not a slightly reskinned version of everyone else’s.
It helps to look at this as a trajectory rather than a single game, because the rest of the Elder Scrolls series basically charts the exact process I am complaining about. Oblivion kept a real skill and attribute system but started softening the edges, level scaling the world around you so wandering off the beaten path stopped being genuinely dangerous or genuinely rewarding in the way it was in Morrowind. Skyrim went further still, flattening the skill list, collapsing attributes into a simple health, magicka, and stamina spread, and adding a compass with a quest marker that, once it existed, became almost impossible for players to willingly turn off even when the option was sitting right there in the menu. Each entry is a perfectly enjoyable game in its own right, and Skyrim in particular is one of the most successful RPGs ever made for good reason. This being said, you can watch the handholding creep in real time across three games, and it is not a coincidence that Morrowind is the one people now go back to specifically because it never went through that softening process. It stayed exactly as demanding and exactly as obtuse as it was in 2002, and it turns out a lot of people missed that.
The combat comparison is worth making honestly rather than nostalgically, because Morrowind’s combat is not good in the way people usually mean when they praise old games. Retro action games, the character action and beat em up lineage that a game like Marvel’s Wolverine is clearly drawing from, built their combat around player skill in the moment, reading an attack animation, timing a dodge or a parry, punishing an opening you created yourself. That tradition is still alive and it still works when a studio commits to it.
Morrowind is not that. Morrowind’s combat is a dice roll wearing a first person view, your chance to hit is determined by your skill values and your fatigue, and yes, that means you can swing a sword directly through someone’s chest and simply miss. A lot of people bounce off that hard, and fairly. But it comes from a different lineage entirely, the tabletop RPG lineage, where combat is one more system your character sheet governs rather than a test of your own reflexes. It is worth remembering that these are two legitimately different ideas of what combat is for, and neither one is the objectively correct answer. What is frustrating about a lot of modern big budget RPGs is that so many of them have sanded down the tabletop influence entirely in favour of action combat, without actually committing to the discipline that makes retro action combat good in the first place. You end up with something that is neither a real skill test nor a real character system, just a middle ground that satisfies nobody.
None of this would matter as much if Morrowind did not also nail something almost no modern game bothers attempting anymore, which is making the world itself feel genuinely alien. Vvardenfell does not look like a generic fantasy setting with the serial numbers filed off. Giant mushrooms serve as houses. Ash storms roll across the landscape and actually damage you if you are caught in one. The wildlife is unrecognizable, guar instead of horses, silt striders instead of carriages, netches drifting overhead like something out of a fever dream.
The Dunmer culture, the political structure of the Great Houses, the religion built around living gods you can actually go meet, none of it is borrowed from the standard high fantasy toolkit. Walking into Vivec City for the first time and having no idea what any of it means or how any of it works is not a design failure, it is the entire point. That disorientation, the sense that you have been dropped into a culture and an ecosystem that owes you no explanation, is exactly what so much modern fantasy design has smoothed away in the name of readability. Everything has to be legible at a glance now, every silhouette has to read instantly as sword or shield or enemy type. Morrowind never cared about being legible at a glance. It cared about being a place, and being a place sometimes means the player has to sit with not understanding something for a while.
What is genuinely striking is how often people trying Morrowind for the first time in 2026, or coming back to it after years away, describe the exact same arc. The first few hours in Seyda Neen are rough. The interface is clunky, the combat rolls are confusing if you do not know what governs them yet, and the game does not do a single thing to soften that landing. But push past that initial stretch and something clicks, people start talking about actually understanding what their character sheet is doing for the first time, actually reading skill descriptions instead of skimming past them, actually caring whether they took Long Blade or Short Blade as a major skill.
It forces a kind of engagement with RPG mechanics that a lot of modern RPGs let you coast past entirely. And a huge part of what keeps people there once it clicks is the atmosphere, Jeremy Soule’s score in particular, which does not try to overwhelm you with orchestral bombast the way so many modern game soundtracks do. It is sparse, ambient, almost uneasy in places, and it matches a world that is trying to feel unfamiliar rather than comforting. None of that would matter as much either without the modding scene that has grown up around the game over more than two decades, one of the most dedicated and genuinely strange communities in all of gaming, still building total overhauls, full new landmasses, and graphical rebuilds for an engine that is by any measure ancient at this point. The bugs never really went away, Morrowind is famously janky even by Bethesda standards, and yet none of that seems to matter to the people rediscovering it. If anything, the roughness is part of what convinces people the game is not lying to them.
This is not just a sentiment people are posting about either. It is showing up in what people are actually buying and playing right now. The Oblivion Remaster’s shadow drop turned into one of the bigger surprise successes of the year, and the willingness of the gaming public to pay full price for a twenty year old game with a fresh coat of paint speaks to a hunger that modern open world RPGs simply have not been feeding. The clearest data point, though, might be the Gothic Remake, which sold over half a million copies in its first week alone and settled into a Very Positive rating on Steam despite critics giving it a much more mixed reception. What makes that number worth citing here specifically is that Alkimia Interactive did not sand down what made the original Gothic difficult.
The remake kept the same unforgiving progression, the same reliance on the player actually learning the world’s systems instead of being walked through them, the same willingness to let you get in over your head against something you had no business fighting yet. That is a game actively refusing to add the modern handholding conveniences, selling half a million copies in a week, while a game as polished and well funded as Marvel’s Wolverine is getting dragged for having too much of exactly that. Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, a smaller budget RPG that leans deliberately into old school roughness rather than smoothing it away, has been making real waves outside the usual triple A conversation. And Skywind, the total conversion project rebuilding Morrowind itself inside a modern engine, keeps coming up in the exact same threads, treated less like a curiosity and more like something people are genuinely counting down to.
The interesting part is that a lot of the people pulled in by the Oblivion Remaster and the Gothic Remake did not stop there. They went further back, tried Morrowind itself with no remaster, no graphical varnish, just the original 2002 jank, and came away even more impressed than they expected to be. That is not a small detail. It means the pull is not toward nostalgia dressed up in modern visuals. It is toward the actual, unfiltered design underneath, and that holds up better than a lot of people assumed it would going in.
I do not think this is really about nostalgia either, or at least not only about nostalgia. Plenty of the people bringing up Morrowind in response to the Wolverine reviews were not even playing games when it came out in 2002. What they are responding to is the sensation of being handed a genuine problem to solve instead of a solved problem to walk through. That sensation does not require sixty hours or an open world the size of a small country. It just requires a developer willing to let the player be a little bit uncertain for a little bit longer than five seconds.
None of this means Marvel’s Wolverine is a bad game, and the review scores mostly bear that out, sitting in the upper seventies to low eighties depending on the aggregator, which is respectable even if it is a noticeable step down from Insomniac’s Spider-Man work. The combat sounds genuinely strong. The performances sound genuinely strong. But it is telling that the loudest criticism circling the game right now is not about a bug or a technical failure. It is about the game refusing to get out of its own player’s way, and that criticism is landing because so many people are exhausted by the same complaint showing up release after release.
Retro games like Morrowind are not popular again because people suddenly developed a taste for clunky combat and dated graphics. They are popular again because somewhere in the last fifteen years a huge portion of the industry decided immersion and accessibility were the same thing as constant instruction, and a lot of players quietly disagree. Wolverine did not create that feeling. It just happened to be the game that made a lot of people say it out loud this week.