>>27341
>the changing of Cyrodiil from a jungle to a fairly generic fantasy landscape is highly reflective of this
Yeah, this is one of the things that bothers me. It doesn't have to be full on Amazon Rainforest, it could very easily be a less exotic but still distinct form of rainforest. Style-wise, I think a subtle easternization in the remake would also be appropiate, as is rice farming. It was never supposed to be Asia but they just made fantasy Enland with a roman tint when it should had been medieval Southern France/Italy with a chinese/japanese tint instead.
>I can still remember the garbage ass E3 trailer Shithesda would release trying to advertise it as having a living breathing world using heavily edited game footage of an NPC going through their day when the reality was that they just go to specific spots and stand around doing nothing except doing random idle animations
It was pretty good for it's time in this regard, though. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's better than Starfield as many NPCs are outright static in that game. Making complex AIs with proper schedules for NPCs is a lost technology in modern times, sadly.
>or the myriad of bullshit lies the Fallout 3 trailer had.
Fallout 3 was full of bullshit but it did have some nifty things that you don't really see elsewhere. For example, if you deposit an item in a container in that game, the NPCs whose AI is active in the area will wander around and possibly open the container to pick up the items. The only recent game that has things like this that I can remember is Kenshi.
>>27342
Bethesda's writing for that era (up to skyrim, arguably) was to brainstorm a bunch of cool ideas and stitch them together with tape and superglue. So there's a bunch of very memorable individual events but they don't play very well with the larger scope of things.