I think Skyrim is when many gamers realized this. The quests in Oblivion were better, and aside from that, it was just more of the same.

I felt like Morrowind struck a great balance between clunk and depth. Skyrim was polished but had no depth.

Something like Kingdom Come Deliverance feels way more clunky to me, but has far less appeal to general audiences than the Elder Scroll games. Although, there are extremely passionate fans of it, so there's obviously still a market for that kind of game.

To be fair morrowind was full of clunk, many people were turned off by game mechanics, plus generally forgetting to save before dieing and losing your whole character.

I think the problem is they tried to scale up the production to reach more people, which increases costs. They can't make a unique/interesting/quirky game because they have to sell to a huge amount of people or else its a failure. Morrowind likely didnt have the "market cap" skyrim did, but morrowind is full of creativity and choices.

Morrowind sold 200k copies its first year, and 4 million over its first 4 years while skyrim sold 7 million its first week and 30 million in its first 4 years.

The fucked up thing is that no matter how bad and disappointing Starfield was, and no matter how bad and disappointing their subsequent games will be, I’ll still buy and be naively excited for Elder Scrolls VI because Skyrim was such a foundational gaming experience 😩