Has to be my favorite fictional setting by far - the worldbuilding isn’t just the “muh deep lore” shit but actually incredibly fascinating religious cosmology and philosophy. The 36 Lessons of Vivec, the Sword Meetings of Cyrus, the concept art…

This is all almost entirely separate from what is actually represented in game though. They can’t help themselves but make generic western fantasy fetch quest sandboxes.

It does but all the amazing worldbuilding is an illusion caused by character statements and books in-game that expound on interesting lore. Most of it is never actually relevant, never appears in game, or when it does appear in game, it is changed radically to be more mundane and not at all how it was described (Cyrodiil). I think the only cool lore that actually paid off was when they foreshadowed all the Dragonborn business in Skyrim in a few ways including Mankar Camoran seemingly being a Dragonborn due to be able to wear the amulet and describing "speaking fire" or something in one of his books

Pretty much everyone of the original crew that built the world dipped by the end of Morrowind. In one of those ungodly 8+ hour retrospectives I watched I remember them sorta dissecting quests in Morrowind in terms of who wrote them and in doing so you could sorta see the proto-modern Bethesda emerge from Todd's design choices.