Morrowind was utterly amazing and set up bars that are still being look at two decades later.
For starters, only the Rimworld engine gets close to how moddable the creation engine is. It truly is a masterpiece of design.
Then, as cheesy as it is, for an Open world sandbox RPG with a quest line.
But they've been riding that gravy train for 20 years too, and all they really did was jam in graphical improvements, add increasingly barebones action elements(sword/gunplay) and rip out RPG elements.
Yeah, sure, it was that one thing that one time in that one game that people laughed at. That was it. It totally wasn't the success of microtransations on mobile devices, with people paying real money for five second clips of MIDI versions of popular song or anything like that.
The big blasts were definitely the 36 Lessons - done in a week, siloed in a single room, food left outside the door by roommate but hey kids no drugs, just lots of smokes and bourbon- the Mythic Dawn Commentaries were all written on a couple of bus rides, and all the Towers lore which I wrote one night at a laundromat waiting for my sheets to dry.
I imagine if this were EA we were talking about we’d ascribe a lot more control to the publisher. This is feeling very nitpicky at this point man. Have a good one.