I don't love either one, though I did enjoy Gothic more. I feel like you're glossing over some of the problems that kept Gothic from being the classic game some here claim it to be. The user interface was complete garbage, for instance. To this day I remember it as the worst user interface I've ever encountered in an RPG. That's not a small thing. People care about that. Another thing that matters to RPG gamers is equipment. In Gothic, there were only a few outfits you could obtain throughout the course of the game. And they were one-piece outfits, not the various items people were used to obtaining and equipping on their characters. Additionally, most (all?) were obtained via faction story line and awarded to the player, rather than being looted or bought. People care about that, too. Virtually every RPG on the market at the time did these things better. Morrowind, much better. Also, you say Gothic is sandboxy, but it's really not, is it? Areas only respawn between chapters, if at all, some areas are linear and others control access, interactions with NPCs are usually few and strictly limited, and so on. The Sandbox was the only thing I liked about Morrowind, and Gothic didn't have it. Nor did it have the party based system of other popular RPGs at the time. It also didn't have the great story of some other RPGs at the time, despite what some people here say. And I recall a lot of people crowing about how Gothic had voice acting for all dialog, whereas other games including Morrowind did not. Well, that may be true, but the voice acting was horrible. Bad enough to put people off. It put me off. And they only managed to have 100% voice acting for all dialog because there wasn't very much dialog. And that's actually because there wasn't much story. It was really a fantasy combat simulator, wasn't it? In any case, the combat is the one thing that Gothic did better than other action-y first person RPGs of that time period. But without getting past the criminally bad user interface, people would never know about that.