I started with Daggerfall. My family had a subscription to PC Gamer, and got regular CDs containing demos of various games. We would install a demo or two that looked interesting, play them for a while, then move on to something else when the next disk came. Then one day, the CD with the Daggerfall demo came, and I was amazed and inspired by the scale of the world and the range of options available to me. I could be anything, do anything. It didn't seem possible that so much could be on one CD.
I created characters based on anime series I'd been watching at the time, taking advantage of the spellmaker system to re-create their iconic abilities, and mixing and matching outfits on the paper doll inventory to get something close to their outfits. It was actually only years later that I found the full game on a store shelf and bought it, the first game I can recall buying specifically because I wanted to support the people who'd made it, and wanted to encourage more things like this.
I collected and read the in-game books, played through every quest until I'd learned them all by heart, and kept my save game files across multiple replacement computers even long after my hardware became incompatible with the game itself, because I couldn't bare to part with them.
When Morrowind came out, I was hyped. The idea of a game like Daggerfall, but made more realistic. One of the pre-release discussions mentioned following a river to a town, and I was again amazed at the idea of being able to use something that made so much intuitive sense in a video game. It was a step closer to being an actual world, when Daggerfall had already been such an amazing step in that direction that I'd still never seen equaled. I bought the collector's edition, and still have the pewter Ordinator figurine that came with it on display in my house. I studied the paper map that came with it, and tried to get a feel for it while I waited for the chance to install the game.
Things were so beautiful when I started the game, I decided to ignore the advice to take the Stilt Strider to Balmora because I wanted to see more of the gorgeous landscape walking there. The wilderness in Daggerfall had been pointless to travel through, so fast travel had been the way to go, but here, there was something to see on the road. I saw the dwemer ruins near Balmora from a distance and stopped to stare, mistaking the observatory tower for part of some kind of crashed alien space ship.
I will never forget my first encounter with a Lame Corprus. I was on my way to the Urshilaku camp for the main quest, and was in the Ashlands. I'd been playing the game for a while and through I had a solid handle on things. I'd turned away from the computer to tell someone who'd come into the room about the game and what I was up to. Then, I was attacked out of nowhere by something warped and disturbing that I'd never seen before that had come up while my back was turned. Scared the crap out of me.
Eventually, I came to feel the limitations of the game. Daggerfall had been practically infinite in scope, with room for me to play any kind of character I could imagine. Morrowind, for all its beauty and the well written quests and characters, felt restricting. The last character I ever played in an unmodded game was created as a test run of how restrictive the game was.
Before Morrowind came out, one of the developers had said you could finish the game without killing a single mortal being, though one or more immortal beings would have to die, So, I created Gaiden, a warrior who'd sworn an oath to Stendarr to never take the life of another mortal, who would try as hard as I could to do just that. Decided to play him realdeath for some added challenge. To add a layer to the roleplay, he was also not going to just run away from fights, and instead used a combination of hand to hand, command spells, and lock spells to drag the bandits he encountered on the road to the nearest prison and lock them in a cell. I joined the Legion to get legitimate authority, and indeed joined as many factions as I could manage, taking each quest line as far as I could before simply refusing any mission that required I kill someone to advance.
The Hortator and Nerevarine quests were a problem for me. Redoran and Telvanni both required I kill to complete them. It was why Gaiden became as fond of House Hlaalu as he did, since they were the only ones willing to let him become their Hortator without demanding he break his oath. Ordinarily, I'm a Telvanni player.
I don't know if the ability to get an audience with Vivec without completing those quests with a high enough reputation was there originally or if it came in with one of the patches, but I know I never found that option. I knew I could kill Vivec and take Wraithguard that way, but that felt like leaning too hard on a technicality with Vivec not counting only because was technically not a mortal.
So instead, I went to Vemynal and Endusal without Wraithguard, gathered the other two of Kagrenac's tools, slaying only Dagoth Vemyn directly to acquire Sunder, and just endured the damage from using them with healing spells and potions when I destroyed the Heart's enchantments and won the game.
After that, I played modded versions of the game for a while, stretching out my options. I completed two mods of my own, one to tweak the Hircine Ring to fit with how it had worked in Daggerfall, and another, a sort of house mod creating a submarine based on the ones from the Death Gate Cycle books I was always fond of.
I toyed for a while with the idea of creating a mod to take advantage of the various divinity inducing artifacts lying around the base game. It started with the idea of using necromancy to call up Sotha Sil's spirit in the Clockwork City and bind it in a custom Soul Gem to create a Mantella, but couldn't work out a way to make the options for gathering worshipers and building alliances with the Divines and Daedra Princes that I had in mind work in-game in a way that would leave the player feeling like they were actually in control of the process rather than following along with a quest line. And that felt wrong for a mod about being a god. So, I scrapped the idea, but the mechanics I'd worked out for managing player immortality came with me in the mod I actually ended up making.
After trying out the existing Sixth House mod, and finding it didn't fit with my own vision, I decided to create Great House Dagoth. I contacted Cortex, the author of the Scripted Spells mod and asked for permission to use his creature transformation scripts to make Great House Dagoth possible, and once I had his permission, began work. I'd initially had higher ambitions for the ending, with the optional side mission for Dagoth Gilvoth allowing him to actually finish Akulakhan and having it march on Vivec city. I decided to leave the annoyingly long resource gathering quest in place to help emphasize just how big Gilvoth's job actually was and to provide motivation for the player to just kill him and move on.
I'm still quite proud of how the Caius interrogation option turned out, and the relevance of Gilvoth's quest completion to that option. Being able to just lie and say you were still on Caius' side, tell the truth about actually being on his side, kill him and take the papers off his body, or drag him back to your Crater Citadel and lock him up until his scooma addiction gets to him and he breaks, giving you what you want felt like the kind of freedom I was most looking for. That you can only get him to break if you finished Arynys' quest to get the dungeon added and Gilvoth's quest to keep Caius from being able to teleport out made for a nice bit of flexibility, and called back to what I'd learned from Gaiden's playthrough about how to imprison NPCs.
I played Oblivion and enjoyed it well enough, and Skyrim after that, but I always came back to Morrowind. I was upset at the fate of the place revealed in Skyrim, since I'd become so invested in the land and its peoples. That what I'd done with Great House Dagoth had saved the worlds and legacies of so many of the characters I'd played after that was a comfort.
