I'm a pretty hardcore gamer, I have an awesome custom modded arcade stick for my imported Street Fighter 3, I play and love ridiculously niche titles, and stay very up to date on the industry. With all of that it's still rare that I spend this much time with a game. 20 hours in and I've barely scratched the surface.
The lack of exploration isn't because I haven't been running around, I have, to many places, it's just that there are so many places to run to and sights to see and quests to fulfill. My lumbering pace is quite deliberate as I'm choosing to walk every place I go, which includes traversing to both ends of the map. Along the way I spend most of my time doing 2 things, finding and picking flowers, and exploring hidden caves and dungeons.
So why do I pick flowers? Because I like to make many awesome potions that help my relatively weak fighter kill the zombies, skeletons and bandits found in said caves and dungeons, and I need to get myself back into the Mages Guild. The attention to detail is just ridiculous but gets you really immersed in the game. Every single building in every single town has been hand crafted with intense work to make this a believable world. It really struck me yesterday as I was wondering through this woman's house and everything in it just made sense, the placement of the books, the food, cookware, clothes, everything. It's really quite amazing. The living nature of the world is another great device that sucks you in. I was walking along an out of the way path when out of nowhere a person on a horse just comes galloping by, completely on their own and doing their own thing off to wherever. And just like watching real people pass by through a car window, I thought to myself I wonder where they're going...
Now reading this, if you're not a huge nerd, then you must think that I'm a huge nerd and this game is ridiculously stupid/boring. Fair enough. And to be honest the game isn't really fun in the sense of "woohoo! ya!" it's just very enjoyable, engrossing, and quite relaxing. I really do like walking around these beautiful landscapes enjoying the scenery, listening to the music and picking my flowers. And when I feel like doing something exciting I just take on a quest and go kill some bad guys.
Like the predecessor I can see myself spending a lot of time with this game over the course of the next couple of months. In fact I think I might be spending a lot more time than the 100 hours I put into Morrowind, which kind of scares me, but I look forward to it anyway.
