[NanoCoaster]

Alternatively, just let people mod their games as they please.

I see your point and you're not wrong, but people have different priorities and playing video games is a hugely subjective experience anyway. Yes, adding a sentence or two about how the game may not look and feel as intended could be a nice idea. But it's not _wrong_ to change it, if that's what you prefer.

I've played Morrowind vanilla and with loads of mods (including graphical improvements) and I honestly liked the modded one better. Just personal preference.

[ogurechny]

My point was not about mods at all. Using a mod is a conscious decision, both when adding pink ponies, and when fixing a bug that causes you to fix saves or edit scripts manually. My point was about the trap people fall into because software and tools auto-select highest or native resolution, or because they are used to doing that manually in every game's settings screen, or because “bigger equals better”. Here they don't even understand the conscious decision to choose a suitable setting has to be made.

Look at some examples:

https://vintage3d.org/gallery/vt4.php

Rough pixels, rough edges, rough effects, everything is more or less balanced. On the contrary, when you streeeeeeeeetch the same 64×64 texture onto a single polygon covering half of your giant screen, then blend it with pixel-perfect light gradient, it won't ever look good. But a lot of people today call the monstrosity they see on screen in high res a “vanilla look”, and even reason about its visual quality.

Morrowind was made in later era, and was less resolution-dependent, as there was a range of accelerators of varying performance to run on. Still, its user interface makes it clear that playing in resolutions higher than commonly available at the time was not really considered. Many other games simply crash or develop bugs at high resolutions because they weren't even tested with those (or it was simply impossible with contemporary consumer hardware). When people release “fixes” for that, they don't question themselves whether everything that is possible to do should really be done.

Game makers had some top hardware configuration in mind as a performance and quality reference. In simple terms, the beefiest machine in the studio set the gold standard for the look of the game. I would advise against setting game resolution higher than that for '90s and significant part of 2000s games to see the game the way it was meant to be seen (visuals produced in modern shader graphics era are much less dependent on rendering resolution if they aren't constructed in a hacky way).