The sad thing about Bethesda is that its line of games was originally inspired by the combination of Ultima VII: The Black Gate and Ultima Underworld, if I remember correctly. Ultima VII provided the inspiration for the open world, and UU for the first person perspective.
It's as if two brilliant geniuses inspired a complete retard, who completely misunderstood everything they stood for and regurgitated their achievements in a bunch of nonsense, and then, when they both disappeared into the mists of the past, became emperor for life.
That is because they never got the core of what made Ultima great.
It wasn't Byzantine politics or Thanatos pile-ups a la Elder Scrolls. It wasn't a cast of thousands, each with its own VA. It wasn't 3D animation.
At its heart, Ultima was about the human condition. The 4-6 trilogy did this well: The betterment and good that comes from following a set of moral and ethical codes, the oppression and evil that comes from forcing that code on people without their willing participation, and the misinterpretation and misunderstandings and bigotry that comes when two diverse cultures meet.
Ultima 7 was a continuation of this. In it, Gariott actually protrayed something that is happening today IRL: The Fellowship profess to do good deeds and their creed seems to be benign and even uplifting, but a closer examination shows the rot lying within the flowers. And the leaders of the Fellowship were using their message of peace, unity and tolerance to further their own power, greed, lust and dark aims. It is an analogy of political correctness.
What do Bethesda have? Err... well, you get to become a living god for a bunch of dark elves, and you get to be an errand boy for the true protagonist of the story, and... you get to detonate a nuclear bomb!