

I disagree on it being weird the thing that makes it great. No, it’s because they cared. They wrote a deep intriguing story, and they trusted the player to treat the world as meaningful and to learn on their own. They expected you to read and to be interested.
Now, everything is dumbed down and simple, and it’s baby fed to the player. There’s little to discover that isn’t shoved down your throat. Sure, there’s (precedurally generated) loot to gather, but nothing more.
Morrowind was built as a world, and then they set a game there. The people, locations, and events make sense in that world. Starting especially with Skyrim, but even with Oblivion, it’s built as a theme park. The world is just there to entertain you, but there’s nothing behind the fecade.





I know there’s one quest that gives the wrong directions. I assume that’s part of the reason they don’t do it anymore. If they modify the game and the position of something changes they need to go back and modify any text that referred to it. With a quest marker they just mark the location and it works automatically. It shouldn’t be that hard to make a procedural text directions generator though, but that wouldn’t work with 100% voices lines.
Thats part of the reason I think that is flawed. They can’t have characters give you detailed lore about the world because it needs to be voiced, so they have to shove it in a book, which means you can’t have a conversation about it. I think a hybrid approach would be better, but there’s no way Bethesda is going to do that now.
I guess there is an argument for AI generated voices for this task. It’d be doing something that is impossible to do otherwise, so it’s not replacing anyone.
Sorry, that was a huge tangent/rant.