When I first played it years ago, I was totally taken aback by the first-person view and the clunky combat system, which made me decide to leave it behind forever. Fifteen years later, I came back with a different mindset, willing to get lost in the immensity of its world.

Paradoxically, the game shines in its design, yet that is also where it suffers the most. The world is so big and so ambitious with its multiple main and sub-quests, NPCs, and dialogue options, that sometimes these elements overlap and render each other useless. For example, there was a certain NPC who asked me for an item, but when I was about to give it back, she died in a different scripted quest, leaving the task in my log loaded forever. It also happened that multiple things were trying to "get my attention" at once—whether through the camera angle or an event, but since they overlapped, it just became noise. For instance, a courier came to deliver a letter at the same time a vampire was attacking, while some weird phenomenon was happening in the sky as part of the story.

Regarding the main quest: it was... okay? I mean, it wasn't particularly deep. I never had contact with Elder Scrolls lore, so everything was pretty new to me. It did make me wonder about the rest of the games, so I guess it fulfilled its purpose.

As for the guild quests, by far the best ones are the Dark Brotherhood and the Companions. The rest are kind of "meh." The DLCs were a nice addition, in particular Dragonborn, which added a new island to travel to and a lot of extra quests. Dawnguard was very bad: buggy, poorly scripted, and the story made no sense to me, but Serana delivered such mother is mothering behavior that I won't complain. I guess most mods nowadays fix the issues the game has, but I went for the full vanilla experience.

The music was amazing and very immersive. Because of the weird scripting, sometimes the music would overlap with a moment where it made no sense, but that happens when you have too much going on on the screen.

Some other random stuff I wanted to comment on:

• I married a random dude from the Companions, and it was super ridiculous to hear him call me "love" with his "I just had three vodkas voice, lmao.
• My favorite side quest was the one where you pass out and wake up not knowing what happened.
• Riding dragons is very lame; you can't control them at all, they just go in circles while you move the camera. Why would you implement such a horrible way to ride a dragon? Beats me.
• As Roach suggested, I became stupidly rich by selling potions early in the game.
• In total, I clocked 129 hours of gameplay. I left some minor side-quests unattended and failed a few others... either because an NPC died or I just pressed the wrong button, lol.

Truly a classic but it can test your patience sometimes.