The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
7/10
This is my first TES game. Overall, I liked it and sank almost 120 hours in it.
I adored the freedom of exploration: the game is pretty big, and the quests have you go all over the map to retrieve an item, kill a monster or find an NPC. There is a lot of things to do: just explore, level skills/stats, do main story quests, faction quests or random quests you stumble upon, farm gold, enchant items, buy or create new spells, talk to NPCs or read books to learn more about the lore, steal items from houses... The game also looks great with the Overhaul mod, it is almost like a modern game with all settings maxed out.
Now, to what I disliked. The combat is extremely simplistic and one-dimensional, and although it doesn't make the majority of the game, it still should have been better. Music is good, but limited: the same small set of tracks is played all the time, regardless of where you are - vast difference from what I'm used to from Bioware games, where tracks are varied between locations, creating the atmosphere. A lot of opportunities to break the game by creating extremely powerful enchantments, potentially infinitely leveling, etc. - and that's given that the game isn't hard as it is even on the hardest settings. Quests are extremely repetitive and boring: "Go to the other end of the map and bring me some magic ring; I won't tell you what that ring is and why I need it, just bring it to me", "Go to the other end of the map and kill someone", "Escort an NPC through half the map, trying not to ragequit due to their HORRIBLE pathing" (whoever designed those escort missions has earned a special place in hell). Extremely vague descriptions of quests: I lost count to how many times I had to consult with wiki to figure out what to do next or where to go. Quest description might say, "Go to the west from Tel Fyr and find a tomb in which an artifact lays" - while in reality it is closer to the north, just a bit to the west, and you will never in your life find it if you just follow the official directions.
Worst of all... BUGS! Holy mother of god, I don't think I've played such a bugged game ever in my life - and that's with the Code Patch, a mod that fixed a ton of bugs present in the original game. Sometimes you randomly fall through the floor and have to reload the game. Often some important script doesn't fire up, many of them game-breaking - I had to use console a few dozen times to fix things. Items randomly being unequipped, sometimes disappearing from the inventory; regular game crashes; NPCs getting stuck and not letting the players ever pass without killing them; some quest NPCs attacking you without talking to you, blocking you from completing quests...
All these cons considered, I enjoyed the game. I don't think I will ever be replaying it, one time is enough - but it got me into TES series and made me appreciate open world RPGs more. Now to play Oblivion and, then, Skyrim!