I beat Morrowind last night. It isn't nearly as long as I thought. It only took me 42 total days of game time to beat it. Considering that each day in the game takes about an hour to cycle through, that means it took me about 42 hours of playing to beat. Everyone was saying that it was like a hundred plus hours of gameplay. I'm very disappointed with the ending sequence, but there isn't a real end - you get to keep playing, which is good. I actually died several times trying to defeat the final boss before I figured out what you're supposed to do to make him easier to kill: You fight him in this gigantic chamber which houses this humongous golem he's constructing which will enable him to drive the Empire off of the island of Morrowind. The golem has a "heart" - the source that all of the "false gods" of Morrowind used to derive their immortality and super powers and whatnot. The bad guy is one of the false gods, so you have to destroy the heart to make him killable. But in order to destroy the heart, you somehow have to break through this shield around it. How do you do that? You use this badass warhammer to crack the shell and then a badass shortsword to stab the heart. Once the heart is gone, Mr. Bad Guy dies pretty quickly. But you have to get out of there in time because once the heart is gone, the golem starts falling apart into a boiling lake of lava below. I died several times trying to achieve this, then I finally said, "Fuck it," jumped over the motherfucker and ran my ass out of there. The idiot followed me, so I hid and backstabbed him as he went by and he died. Nice and easy. So now I've got this awesome ring which never lets me get tired and lets me see in the dark. And I get to keep playing as this protector of the people now.
I'm going to replay the game and see if I can join the bad guy now. Not sure if that's possible.