So I finally finished Baldur's Gate for the first time last night after owning it for years and enduring multiple restarts due to my impatience with the game, forgetting what was going on, and then coming back to it only to have forgotten everything there was to it.
That effing Theives' Maze was such a lazy, tedious map. It's like a level designer took the most marginally functional and unenjoyable aspect of the game -- pathfinding -- and decided to torture the player with it one last time before the unsatisfying final battle.
And I walked through it twice because I decided to go back for the golden pantaloons. Fuckers.
Yeah, I'd also recommend trying Morrowind. It's going to feel pretty dated at this point and fairly janky, but it's a huge game with a lot of idiosyncrasies, for better or for worse.
While there's definitely a lot of questing and looting and character development, I hesitate to call it an RPG first and foremost because of the expectations that label sets. My first go round with the game when I was craving a deep, meaty and traditional RPG experience petered out apathetically after a few weeks playing it. The combat's pretty blah, the NPC interactions are mostly cookie-cutter text dialogue tree affairs, and the the story and fleshing out of the world is all basically handled with text, too. The traditional RPG elements aren't very robust.
I started fresh some time later when I was craving a different gaming experience and got hooked for 100+ hours. The thing to realize about Morrowind is that the most satisfying and robust elements of the game are exploration and experimentation. The world is so big and the areas within it so visually distinct. I remember once just picking a far-flung corner of the map to go to just to see what was there and feeling satisfied by the sight of towns hewn out of massive trees crazily twisted by the magic of the area's ruling faction. It was completely unique. Another time I levitated up to a temple where Vivec (?), a living god referenced in the in-game literature, hung out and fought him just to see if I could kill a god around whom so much of the world and world history is built around. (You can).
There's also robust alchemy, crafting and spell-making systems that facilitate your character's exploration and looting. By plucking the right ingredients from local flora and killing the right fauna, you can make potions and enchant gear with some crazy character effects... like levitation or super fast running or night vision, or being your own glowing light source.
It's a weird experience to describe, and definitely one you'll have to be patient and open-minded about to develop an appreciation for, but if you can it's a really satisfying game.
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