When this came out, the graphics was astounding, but playing it from the perspective of Morrowind fan, it was greatly disappointing. Many elements of the game mechanics that made Morrowind incredible experience were removed. Levitation - gone. Individual parts of the armor? Gone. Throwing weapons? Gone. Teleportation spells (mark&recall, intervention spells) gone. WORST: story full of mystery and intrigue? Gone. From "old cult, strange dreams, superhuman powers" went down to another "New cult wants to bring in deamons to the world, save the realm oh mighty hero!". I could never find the motivation to bother with stopping the Daedra invasion at any point. World levels with you - "oh, you're lvl xx? Here, let's bring some random thugs all wearing SUPER RARE vulcanic glass, armor that costs more than a small county makes in a year. Freedom and open world? Sure, until you don't try to kill this shop keeper who's important for a minor quest. Or another annoying npc. In Morrowind, if you killed someone important for the main plot you got a message you messed up and live with it or reload. The combat system - it's a matter of preference, but I disliked how blocking started to soak up some damage instead of being all or nothing. There was a mod of course to repair it, but side effect was your 2h weapon/shield was wearing out rapidly. Mana regeneration changed magic users dramatically, more importantly, many awesome spell effects have been removed and spells limited to your skill. You can no longer make a gamble spell from Morrowind that would have 30% chance to succeed, but obliterate your enemy in one blast. Story - major weak point. I found it simply uninteresting, cliche and poorly written. Save the kingdom, I've seen good in you... (dude, I'm in prison for *you don't know what*). Mage guild quest line was a nonsense. Fighters guild not much better. The only two reasonably interesting ones were the Dark Brotherhood and Thieves Guild. And I prefer to RP spell-swords.
I had high hopes for this game, but it's been all for nothing. The game makes you collect honor for a group of vikings who were denied entry to Valhalla. Sounds like fun, right? Well... sounds. And that's about it. You are pushed into a number of frozen wasteland islands where only a tiny plot of land is possible to farm, monsters scattered around so your hunters have high chance of dying instead of bringing food. The little green area gets placed in an impossible to use area (must collect stones and/or chop down trees to use it) Before you manage that, your people get too hungry to work, soldiers starve to death and fall. And all that before you even kill your first enemies in the area! If I wanted to play "feed me now" simulator I'd buy a tamagotchi. To add an insult to the injury, the game can't figure out which screen to use and won't resize to my main screen resolution anyway.
Being a fan of old classics like monkey island and broken sword I had high hopes for this game. They were in vain. The good: Graphics - it's pretty! The bad: Characters - they can't be liked. Main character is a jerk. And not the funny one. Humor - as per protagonist... it's sad. Gameplay - you need to pretty much click every dialogue option, try every item to get through this disappointment. As some people said, puzzles get into complete nonsense that drags on ad infinum.
I remember when I was much younger I bought it in one of the local shops. At first I got killed by pirates, later by guards... But some time later, as I got better (at finding NPCs) I realised this game has an insane potential - and the save files are easy to edit, thus my main character became a dragon. Story is ok, perhaps nothing super epic, but it's good - and by today's standard it's more than good taking how boring many modern games are - plot wise. The really remarkable part of this game however is the mechanics. Offers incredible freedom including flight, unique powers and races that normally represent monsters that get killed by heroes.
