But what I'd like to add is that the success of Skyrim has had beneficial effects for non-hiking sims as well. If you can make a best-selling game where you plop the player in a huge open world and let him wander around and do as he pleases, pick up and manipulate anything in the environment, and build a character out of hundreds of perks, then you can also make a non-open world game (with tighter level design and a stronger narrative) that allows players to do those things. Skyrim is a dumbed down game, but its success still provides a pathway for even more dumbed down games like Mass Effect to become better, without necessarily becoming open world hiking sims themselves. (which doesn't mean that they will, of course)
The trick is, design is not a U-pick fruit lot, it is more of an avante-garde mural that must be crafted by a team, so certain patterns fit well together to make an interesting picture, others do not fit well at all.
With Skyrim's success, the suits will all think that they can take pieces of Skyrim and add them to other games and thus produce another mega-game of Skyrim's sales caliber. But that's not how it works. Break up the pieces of Skyrim and it breaks the combination of elements that made Skyrim so popular. Add too many of those broken-off elements to another game, and you typically also break what gave that other game what popularity it did have.
And that is because Skyrim is a giant dicking-around simulator. It is a giant consequence-free sandbox playpen, just like the kind you had at preschool. Nothing you do matters, everything and everyone tells you that you're someone special, and does so repeatedly. This makes it so people like Angry Joe can flip the game on (consoles, you know), not read anything as they activate quests, and just go and insert their dicks into whatever game crevices (in the case of loverslab, quite literally so) they feel like at the given moment, and the game won't care. There is no reactive consequence - you can go around killing innocents one day just cause you had a bad time at work, but then the next day go be a total paladin, and the thing is - the game won't react to either, beyond giving you reward-treats for both. And then people say, "Oh, the game is so reactive, it detects when I'm being a total asshole and gives me [insert reward messages, gear, and achievements here]". Because that's the sum extent of the reactivity the dicking-around crowd wants. It gives them treats for their dicking around in the sandbox (and not bothering mum for a while), and lets them be totally awesome (aren't you a good boy) no matter what they're doing.
Plus of course the game MUST scale, so you can keep sticking your dick wherever you want at any given moment, and yet still have the game play exactly the same way every day no matter where you decide to go stick your dick that day. Even the Learn By Doing skill system is meshed into constantly handing out positive yet meaningless rewards. And not just the point increases, but eventually having high skills become a part of the populace commenting about how awesome you are. Yet, at no point is raising those skills ever made necessary, so people don't actually have to interact with the numbers (you know, the actual skills) in any meaningful way, don't have to do anything they don't want to do, can just keep going dicking around wherever they want.
All of the above design elements and more all mesh together to form that giant dicking around and penis-stroking simulator. Breaking off pieces of that design and adding them to a different style of game doesn't lead to a better, more popular game. It just leads to a flacid version of the dicking simulator that nobody buys. Not only that, even if you slavishly copy all of Skyrim's dicking elements, why would most people pay to see your game's dicking crevices when they can just go buy Fallout 4 with its official branded crevices or examine Skyrim's crevices more thoroughly? Like all off-brand clones, you will forever be the poor-man's vag.