Morrowind was just fantastic. I loved that everything seemed to always exist. You could wonder around and find a super powerful artifact or kill or lose something required fornthe main quest. It felt more immersive that way.
I really love it when a game is completely happy to allow you to innocently wonder into a zone far above your level and let you get completely squashed by the monsters you find there.
Still something interesting to try.
I guess lore-wise Cyrodiil was supposed to be larger and then tough creatures would make more sense, but in-game, most of it felt like the back yard of the imperial city.
Right after leaving the docs place you can head to the strip in a straight line, and it will take you through a route with some of the most powerful creatures, like giant radscorpions and cazadors, and if you somehow manage to get past them there is a mining site filled with deathclaws!
There are in game warning signs telling you to not take the route but you are totally free to ignore them.
The lore- and world-building, circa Morrowind, was top notch.
and if I stepped away from the game even for a short while...
Nowadays games with massive world-maps have navigation on the HUD, and always-available fast travel. Morrowind had neither. A quest's instructions were like "take the road to Balmora and then on the second fork, go past the tree and you will find a cave". And then you would spend hours trying to find that spot. And unless you had the proper scrolls, you wouldn't even be able to teleport back to a main spot.
It made the world so wonderful to explore.
In Final Fantasy pre-12 the game obfuscated progression steps and quest givers to some extent. As a result the game rewarded you for talking to everyone and, as you never knew what was a quest and what was just filler it you would pay a bit more attention which ended up immersing you in the lore a bit more.
Games are often a lot of smoke and mirrors and once the trick of the magic is clear it's often much more disappointing. I feel that way when games just descend into busy work fetch quests with markers and highlighted words.
If that's true they got rid of this in later elder scrolls games. One of the reasons I abandoned Skyrim before finishing was because the loot leveled with you. You could walk across the world and find a secret cave, yet all the chests therein contain crap. So I had virtually no incentive to explore knowing the loot was randomly generated based on my current level.
Compare to FromSoftware games like Dark Souls where you can run halfway across the world and find super rare and powerful items.
This is especially obvious in the Mournhold sewers were basically every chest you find draws from the "silver weapon" list.
Tribunal also had the usual expansion pack problem of basic enemies carrying better equipment than the top level items in the base game. (The goblin sword is worth 100 gold, but does 10-35 damage! The Daedric Wakizashi, the best short blade in the base game, is worth 48,000 gold... and does 10-30 damage.)
Being able to jump crazy far and breathe underwater were my favourites. The idea of alteration was so fun, hate that they took it out made later games feel much blander esp when I've always thought TES combat sucks . Also the weapon diversity was so much more interesting, they really dumbed down the weapon set in future games, I miss halberds