Really, I don't believe I am looking B1 through rosy glasses or something here, but I think it was decently non-linear given the era it came out. And that small amount of free-roaming it had, where you could talk to irrelevant npcs, coerce/mug/drink some of them, provoke hunters, rob apartments, discover some quests without these strictly being in your way, find random lore, return to some places just because you got better with a skill to crack something, or meet again npcs and getting slightly different dialogue or progress to their story etc, is pretty important to me.