the full moon is nightmarishly white

Wieliczka salt mine, Poland

In southern Poland, Lake Wessel lies inky and unmoving in the deep. Filling the bottom of an old salt mine, it’s just one component of the UNESCO World Heritage Site which has been a functioning mine since the 13th century. Featuring supreme carpentry, centuries-old brickwork and ornate salt-crystal chandeliers in cavernous dining rooms, this fantastical setting is a favorite for the Polish film industry. The mine’s attractions include dozens of statues and four chapels carved out of the rock salt by the miners. The older sculptures have been supplemented with new carvings made by contemporary artists. About 1.2 million people visit the Wieliczka Salt Mine annually. 

a lot of its most arbitrary mechanics are the result of it trying to simplify a system that was much less approachable to a casual audience before it. almost all of its biggest problems (barring actual bugs) are in what it does automatically while smoothing over a crunchier system (see: attack types, or how it tries to increase your attributes automatically in ways that can fuck up your health pool)

this is also, generally speaking, why morrowind's initial reception was one of mainstream and fandom positivity along with complaints from a core crpg audience. that seems unthinkable now, but you can't really achieve an understanding of a game (that is, to meet a game on its own terms) if you place every 20+ year old game into an amorphous mass of "it is old, and old games were harder"

you also see this with, to pull an incredibly adjacent example, world of warcraft. part of understanding what it's actually doing requires you to understand what systems from everquest it is abridging, so you can properly appreciate what design decisions the developers were making beyond "they didn't know what they were doing yet" or "we've forgotten how to do things like this"

while it's true that over-contextualising older games can lead to you forgetting that there isn't an expiration date on the experience of artwork, it's also true that the body of conversations which makes up genre should not be ignored when trying to read for intent