This company also made huge games open to modded stuff. Sure, horse armor was the root of all evil.
But Bethesda also made games like Morrorwind, Skyrim (on every possible device), they also have a huge history like Daggerfall.
TW has Warband and a "failed" Bannerlord wihtout Banners. And if TW would have ANY competition in it´s genre they would have nothing at all.
So no matter how bad Bethesda is, they´re still better than TW, which is also not that hard.
Skyrim's objectively their worse TES game creatively and in terms of Game Design. It's an "Atlantic Puddle" as I like to call it. Shallow but massive, their only redeeming points are supporting mods, yet that means they are sort of leasing free work to make their game better and more popular, increasing their willingness to fail and neglect to push fixes (all companies that over-support mods do it)
Oblivion was a meh game in terms of RPG, but it's still among the best ones you can find that have a high degree of open world to it. TW3's inferior in the Open World simply because we are stuck into a pre-set character with a very narrowed story and "play-style" (objectively easier to tailor), while in Oblivion you could achieve the end-game by a plethora of different paths much like a PnP allows you if you wanna go with RPG logic for your gameplay, that is.
IE: Rise through a guild, specialize your character to deal with the imminent threat - achievable by: Gladiators Guild / Fighters Guild / Assassins Guild / Thieves Guild / Mages Guild / Knights of the Nine Guild (DLC linking to the main quest, awesome) / Shivering Isles/Insane Guild (DLC that can be done BEFORE the Main Quest and yet it still feels like a natural link) all feeling natural and linking naturally to the over-arch of the main quest, even the Daedric Quests are linked to the main quest - so you could sink in on any of those to increase your power to overcome the challenge. Incredibly satisfying results.
In TW3 you are stuck with a Witcher, who's part of the Witchers Guild, and that's it. They did try to add some more depth to that, but no matter what you do, you're still a Witcher that's supposed to "Witcher" around, and even than there's not much detail nor depth to the Witchering, there are limited contracts, most of them feeling generic and off-tone/unlinked to everything, only a handful feel natural and flow well with the main narrative for both DLC and the base-game. Arguably, their Toussant DLC feels better than the entire game did, the other DLC included.
In Skyrim the whole "Chosen One" thing plus the confusing lore makes it narrow, you have to head-canon circumventions to allow yourself to play like you could in Oblivion, still do-able but it feels artificial, too much threat imminency and urgency for you to in-character stroll around and pursue basically any of the guilds' as a "build-up for finale" style. You were also forced into certain guilds to reach the ending, meaning that you were in for a bad trip if you were trying ot RP a "anti-mage" minded character. Made it bad in too many realms, with a lot of potential things unexplored, like the fact that you can get accepted into the Mages College just for being a Dragonborn, they say they wanna study you, but absolutely no follow-up on that, no uniqueness, no story, the entire College Arch is totally detached, same for every other path. Bad writing.
As for other paths, pretty much the same happens, the side-quests are 99% procedurally generated, and the world feels empty and boring because it lacks links and actual "populating" from the devs, so Skyrim's very generic, feels generic, plays generic until you basically pack the game with hundreds of mods to fix it.
All DLC for Skyrim are arbitrary and could be considered crap compared to Shivering Isles or Bloodmoon... So I never use Skyrim as a positive example, it is arguably among the best games of this past decade, but only because the industry has been on a steep fall in the quality department, specially with RPGs. Some ppl come to me from time to time to praise Ubisoft which's just heresy, their games are crap on both RPG and Open World departments.
