OK - I’ve given it a fair shake and I can definitely say that this game lacks the magic of later games. Exploration is repetitive at best and an outright nuisance at worst, and that is what I loved the most about 3, 4, and 5. I took on a quest to snag some Saints Hair from the mages guild and was treated to the windows maze screensaver that extended over 3 tilesets and had SO MANY ingredients… but only after 6 days of delving nearly identical hallways did I find the hair, and to top it all off, the travel times disqualified me from even completing the quest. The next quest was a mission to track down a serial killer, which meant using the eyeball tool to check every single house in a city bigger than every capital in skyrim combined and chatting up bretons with answers like “What you seek may be north, no west, no east” and “what have khajiit done for me lately”. Doing it once wasn’t enough, though - I had to do this exact same task 3 times until an ordinary nightblade appears. Oh, and if I didn’t do that immediately, the quest would have failed in only 2 days.

This was probably a fun toy when it came out, but i cannot imagine playing it all the way through.