When I spent some brief time with The Elder Scrolls Online in 2014, I thought it was a game fighting against a tough duality.

On one hand it was a vision of the much-loved fantasy world of Tamriel — the stage for popular role-playing games like Skyrim and Oblivion — and on the other hand it was a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft. While the potential was there for each of these factors to engender the other with good stuff and make a fantastic game, they also clashed.

Morrowind, the latest expansion of the game which takes players back to the strange island of Vvardenfell last seen in The Elder Scrolls III, is a great showpiece for how far the MMO has come since then. But it also exemplifies the core duality ESO still suffers from.

I loved rediscovering the region, especially as this game takes place hundreds of years before The Elder Scrolls III so that familiar cities are still under construction and key factions are markedly different. The layout and features of the starting town, Seyda Neen, are particularly burned in my brain and are revived faithfully here, as is much of the island.

As in the rest of the game, the core of the experience on Vvardenfell involves making a long journey from place to place as quest-givers ask you to complete tasks and then send you off to someone else who has things for you to do. It's an aspect of MMOs I generally find very tedious, and yet the writing and characterisation here hooked me a few times. It helps that plenty of incidental side missions crop up frequently while you're on the road, and several are very good.

The entire game has grown in leaps and bounds since the last time I played it, with series staples like a justice system, thieves guild and dark brotherhood now baked in. The biggest change has been the removal of level requirements from content to let any player go through as they like, which also makes it easier to group up with friends. This makes Morrowind the ideal kind of add-on for a game like this, as new players aren't forced to grind through the main game to get to the new stuff.

In fact if you're starting a new character you can choose (as I did) to begin your adventure in Vvardenfell. A smart new tutorial introduces the game's world in this unfamiliar place, and when you're done with the Morrowind content the story will loop you back to the Tamriel mainland so you can get started on ESO's core content seamlessly. Returning players will also appreciate the addition of a new class — the Warden — which is a jack-of-all-trades with an earth-magic theme, capable of summoning magical beasts to aid them in battle.

Yet for all ESO's improvements in general and the smart, nostalgic design of Morrowind in particular, I can't overcome the sense that the world is just less fun and impressive removed from the single-player focus of the main Elder Scrolls games. From simplistic enemies to dozens of player-characters wandering around all areas all the time (both practically requirements of MMO games), the style of play here robs the source material of its magic.

It must be noted, of course, that ESO has something that the standard series does not have: a world filled with characters controlled by actual humans. But the entire setup — from the heroic narrative to Morrowind's mushroomy landscapes and lonely silt strider cries — implores me to sit back and explore on my own, at my own pace. Many of the quests and mechanics encourage this kind of play, but the mechanics don't back it up. As a single-player experience, the offline games remain far superior, and comparing The Elder Scrolls III to this new Morrowind only works to show the empty patches in the latter's soul.

The Elder Scrolls Morrowind is out now for PlayStation 4 (reviewed), Xbox One and PC.