I bought my first copy sometime in late spring or early summer of 2006 - not long after release - but my first save for my first significant character is from August of 2009.
When I first got the game, I only played it for three days. On the first day, I made it most of the way through the tutorial dungeon. On the second day, I went up to the Market District and sold loot and shopped and stuff, and started Unfriendly Competition. I got stalled on that - I did all of the normal RPG things - talked to people, looked for notes or notices or any other sort of clues - and couldn't figure out what to do after getting stonewalled by Thoronir. On the third day, thinking maybe I missed something, I checked my journal, and that was when I discovered that the "journal" wasn't a journal at all, but an in-game walkthrough that told me what "I" had "decided" to do next. I shut the game off right then and there and didn't play it again.
I got the GOTY edition for Christmas in 2007 from a relative who knew I liked computer RPGs and didn't know I already owned the original game and disliked it so much that I'd uninstalled it. I went ahead and installed it, but didn't play it much. I'd try it every once in a while, when I had nothing else to occupy my time, but it was probably at least another year, and an awful lot of modding, before I played it with any frequency, and it wasn't until I got to the point that I not only could ignore or mod out the stupid bits like the walkthrough journal and the magic radar, but knew the game well enough to be able to just use Beth's often poorly designed quests as a basis for my own roleplaying, that I started to enjoy it and actually played it long enough to bother hanging onto a character.
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