Ah, Morrowind. For years it's been heralded, not unlike the recently released Neverwinter Nights from Bioware, as the Holy Grail of modern computer role playing games.

The game is the fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls game series, but it's called Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind because two of those other games weren't RPGs (Battlespire was action/strategy and Redguard was an action/adventure).

The word you're going to hear a lot about for this game is "immersion". This starts from the very beginning of the game. Your character, a recently released prisoner, has been transported to the Vvardenfell district of Morrowind due to some mysterious order from the Emperor of Tamriel. After you arrive at the dock, you are told to report to a records clerk. He then asks you about yourself, and at that moment you get to choose your character. It's so organic and smoothly done that as it happened I found myself with that stupid grin on my face that I so often hope I'll wear while playing a game, but so seldom do.

This is an extremely generous game, and the bounty begins as the game gives you three totally different ways to choose and establish your character. First, you can answer a series of tricky moral questions, after which the game suggests a particular type of character would be suited for you. Second, you can choose one of many different class types, everything from Witch Hunter to Spellblade to Assassin to Agent. Finally, you can build your character from the ground up, choosing your main focus (magic, combat, or stealth), five major skills and five minor skills. You can even name your character's class.

In addition to these choices, no matter how you generate your character you also get to pick from several very distinct races and from a dozen different birth signs; each has some particular bonus or other advantage.

After this is done, you're given one assignment (deliver this package to this important guy in yonder town), but other than that, you're on your own. Just wandering around the small starter town and speaking to the citizens can get you embroiled in local politics, intrigue, and murder. And when you decide you're ready to step out into the wide world, well, hang on to your hat.

Why? Because what Bethesda, to its everlasting credit, has pulled off here is something of a miracle for RPG players everywhere: a staggeringly gigantic, diverse, teeming world that begs you to interact with it any way you please.

The designers of this game have taken to heart the caterwauling of RPG players everywhere. "We want freedom! We want non-linear gameplay!" Well, in Morrowind, you've got it friends, and you've got it in spades. In fact, depending on what kind of RPG player you are, it might be too much of a good thing.

It's not that the game doesn't have a main storyline. It does, and an intriguing one it is. But you can take your sweet time getting to this part of the game, or even ignore it altogether. There are so many opportunities for involvement on the island of Vvardenfell, it's downright dizzying.

First of all, there are the guilds. Feel like honing your thieving skills and making some shady friends? Join the Thieves Guild. Feel like kicking some diverse fantasy butt? Join the Fighters Guild. How about hangin' with the magicians for a spell? There's always the Mages Guild.

But that's just the beginning. There are criminal organizations you can join, various "Houses" (sort of like fraternal lodges) you can become affiliated with. Every one of them is chock-full of quests to keep you busy.

Or you can just set off on your own, exploring the game's vast landscape, meeting characters, exploring mines and tombs, and kicking more aforementioned butt.

Morrowind also sports a skill and character-advancement system that encourages individual expression. In this game, skills improve by using them, not by arbitrarily assigning skill points upon a level-up. Want to be a better shot with your crossbow? Fire away. Want to get better at picking locks? Start picking locks, baby. Your character levels up after accomplishing enough skill improvement.

And what a roster of skills it is! There are nearly thirty, and no matter what kind of character you play, you can choose to develop any of them. At the beginning of the game you establish five major and five minor skills, and you get consistent bonuses to these skills as your character develops. With all of this diversity, there will be about as many different character types as there are players of this game.

Graphically, the game is beautiful, with shimmering water, a full 24-hour day, and lots of types of weather. The sandstorm is particularly creepy and effective. The game is presented in either first or over over-the-shoulder third person. And since it's completely unrelated to the very popular Dungeons and Dragons RPG settings, rules, creatures and characters, the game world is wonderfully distinctive and unusual.

The environments in the huge game world are visually diverse and intriguing. Especially interesting is the major city of Vivec, which is a series of gigantic buildings, each sitting in a large lagoon.

All of this beauty comes at a steep processing price, however. The system requirements are downright beastly. Players with a whole variety of new and relatively new computers have had trouble getting this game to run smoothly. I've come to the conclusion that this is the first game that's been released for computers that won't be available until some point in the future. There are various things you can do to tweak your performance, but you can end up spending a lot of time troubleshooting instead of playing, and that's not much fun.

I'm running the game with a GeForceIII card on a 1.7 gig machine, and I'm not entirely happy with the game performance. In particular combat can be a struggle when framerates get sluggish. Having to move around and jockey for position when the screen gets chunky and herky-jerky is very disorienting, and often fatal in difficult confrontations.

The game has further problems with the inventory screen. There are enormous amounts of stuff you collect in this game, from weapons and armor to loot from houses and tombs to magic potions to the various wild herbs used as alchemical reagents. This can make for a crowded inventory. And even though you are able to sort by category, you still end up with large screens with tiny little graphic representations of your various items. There's absolutely no supporting text on your inventory to help you figure out what you're looking for. For example, say you have forty potions. You're staring at a screen containing a huge grid of potions, and you literally have to roll your cursor over each one of them to find out what potion is what. This kind of tedium is unbearable, unacceptable, and unfortunately for players of this game, unavoidable.

Even worse is the journal feature. Even though it does have an admirable hypertext system for referencing important names and places, the quests aren't sorted at all. And, in a world as large as Morrowind, you accumulate a gigantic number of quests. Your character is always in the middle of accomplishing many different things, and the endless, linear, unsearchable journal is simply not enough help in keeping all of these objectives straight. This is a particular problem if you, god forbid, take a little time off from the game and attempt to get back into it later.

In the end, whether this remarkable game is for you will depend on what you value most from an RPG. If you've always felt hemmed in by the artificial constraints placed on traditional RPG game worlds, you may well be in nirvana with Morrowind.

However, after about fifty hours of play, I began to feel like I actually craved a bit more structure. The price of such freedom is that the game world seems very passive. There are thousands of characters hanging around, but none of them are doing anything except waiting for you to come talk to them. They never leave their houses or shops. I found myself longing for the little daily routines that the characters in Gothic would cycle through. After awhile I began to feel a distinct lack of urgency in the game world. As if no one really cared whether I solved the Main Quest or not. This is a far cry from the much-made-fun-of, but very effective, "The World is in Peril and Only You Can Save Us, But You Have To Hurry!!"

It is instructive to remember at this point that I've never actually met anyone who finished either one of the first two Elder Scrolls RPGS: Arena and Daggerfall. Granted, those games were replete with randomly generated dungeons and towns, but even with the 100% hand-crafted tombs, cities and quests in this game, I don't think there will be many people that finish it, either. Ironically enough, Bethesda Softworks has already announced an EXPANSION for the game, entitled Morrowind: Tribunal, due out this November. Perhaps the goal is to literally drown players in this heady and atmospheric world.

Let me stress once again that the pleasures of this game are many. Jump up into a tree and enjoy a spectacular sunset over a lagoon. Go pearl diving amid shipwrecks. Develop skills that are independent of combat. Pursue a full career as a thief, fighter, or temple guard. Shop til you drop. Become an expert assassin, thief, or double agent. Go on a religious pilgrimage.

And if there's not enough game there for you now, with the Elder Scrolls Construction Set, which ships with the game, you can add your own content to the already bursting-at-the-seams game world. Introduce new weapons, weather effects, spells, armor, even character classes.

Another thing I admire about Bethesda's maniacal devotion to this project is that they fly in the face of current convention by having - GASP - no multiplayer mode whatsoever. Bethesda's Pete Hines told me that their goal was to create the ultimate single-player RPG experience. And they've come pretty darn close to achieving that goal, if you ask me.

In the end, however, the features that are Morrowind's greatest strengths are also its greatest weaknesses. If you want to utterly lose yourself in a huge, exotic world, you could have the time of your life. But if you like a saga with a beginning, a middle somewhere, and eventually an end, Morrowind may be too much for you.