The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GOTY Edition

You're a prisoner, sent from the Imperial City -- first by carriage, and now by boat -- to Morrowind. Specifically, to the island of Vvardenfell. You're a reincarnation of Lord Indoril Nerevar, some dude who was betrayed and killed by three people who went on to make themselves physical gods, reigning as the Tribunal. One of those three went on to rewrite history itself so as to "justify" his actions. Their enemy is Dagoth Ur, who has been working for centuries to build a god, slowly convert the Dunmer on the island into an assimulated army, and use these to conquer the continent of Tamriel for the glory of the Dunmer race. Oh, and he's Indoril Nerevar's old best-buddy. None of them are good, none are entirely evil, all four are corrupted. Yes, you are *a* reincarnation -- not the first, and if you fail like the others, not the last. You're nobody special, aside from that shared soul and a prophecy. Life will go on if you fall, and another will be born who might take the role, until time runs out. That's not important, though. Or is it? Well, that's your choice, isn't it? This is an open-world Bethesda game, after all. Follow the main quest, or don't. Continue on through the Tribunal expansion and investigate the mysterious appearance of mechanical, clockwork creatures in the Morrowind Province's capital, Mournhold, and eventually exact justice for the crimes of the other two-thirds of the Tribunal, or don't. Investigate Solstheim and become a werewolf, and kill a third of a Daedra, or don't. I strongly recommend using the Morrowind Patch Project with this -- Bethesda's always been known for great games with myriad bugs, and Morrowind is no exception. I also recommend using the OpenMW engine reimplementation, as it's quite stable, fixes engine bugs, takes advantage of modern multicore CPU better, and some other useful features. Oh, and it supports GNU/Linux and macOS. :D Even without that, it's still the best in the series. The ending of the words is ALMSIVI.

This game was a really amazing game when it first came out. Vast and well designed open world, skill system and progression, quests, immersion, you name it. Unfortunally the vanilla game didn't age well in the graphics department compared to it's successors. But thank's to the fans who worked on the Graphics Overhaul, this game is RPG wise, a much better game by far than Oblivion or Skyrim, since these successors focused more on the "hack and slash - console play" aspect. Morrowind have better story, better skills, better LEVEL SCALING (where you really need to level up if you don't want to suddenly get owned), and now with the Graphics Overhaul plugin, it has a very decent and up-to-today-standards graphics and game world.

One of the games I spent the most time in. 6/5 for the soundtrack. 7/5 for the world building and lore.

No Dragons but still interesting

Put briefly: the gameplay is considerably worse than Skyrim and doesn't hold up that well. The world, however, is far better, and that is the single most important thing in an Elder Scrolls game. Morrowind is a truly unique setting with no direct counterpart in real-world history or well-known fantasy media.