The best adventure games like Morrowind are Gothic II, Outward and Elden Ring. Below are 7, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to adventure costs you.
Filtering to adventure means the place and the story are what you want back, not the challenge. It is the right filter when the thing you remember is where you were rather than what you did.
What you get: A world with a reason to wander it, and writing that survives being read rather than skipped.
What made Morrowind worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the adventure part of that answer, and only the adventure part.
The other great unfriendly RPG of that era, and its world is just as unwilling to explain itself.
No quest markers, real travel, and survival pressure on every journey.
For the exploration-without-guidance, at a much larger scale.
The direct sequel, if you want the systems with a friendlier world.
A total conversion built on Skyrim that deliberately restores Morrowind's opacity.
Where a lot of Morrowind's simulation ideas came from in the first place.
A small modern game openly modelled on Morrowind's fungal weirdness.
Mechanical depth. Several of the best adventure games have combat that is deliberately unsatisfying, because they want your attention somewhere else.
Specifically, these are strong answers for Morrowind that are not adventure games, so they are not on this page:
The full list is on games like Morrowind — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Gothic II. The other great unfriendly RPG of that era, and its world is just as unwilling to explain itself.
No. Morrowind released on the Microsoft Xbox, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Anywhere the story and the place matter more than the skill ceiling — point-and-click, walking sims, narrative thrillers and most open worlds. The label alone tells you very little, which is why each pick here says what it actually is.
They split hard. Open-world adventures run to a hundred hours; the narrative ones are often finishable in an evening, and the short ones are usually the better written.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Morrowind list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is adventure — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the adventure guide for where to start in the genre generally.