I had a similar experience not too long ago with Morrowind.
I think it's easy to overlook how much better games in general have become. Yes, there are a lot of flops, but our standard has risen in part because of old masterpieces.
A lot of early exploration was novelty. We had never before been in such expansive game worlds. Now that's trivial, and you need more to keep stuff going. As a result, many modern games have made sure to keep complex play mechanics going during exploration segments, which was not universal in earlier games.
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