Arena and Daggerfall are interesting to review, I reallized when I was playing them for the first time that I'd seen them before. What I was seeing was Everquest.
Verant borrowed so many ideas from Bethesda in making Everquest it's…remarkable really. That's how influential Bethesda was back in the day. Needless to say Everquest was a phenomenon, which later grew into WoW (details like publishers, developer shops, etc. are irrelevant because there are no game design patents clogging innovation). That's the trend vector that occured. So Bethesda really had something in the early years, and as graphics 'improved' their game model crumbled and convolved more and more into…oblivion (shameless I know).
Using the RNG for world generation doesn't work with 3d models. Bethesda had to 're-invent' themselves drastically, and the more 3d design, static set-piece design, and voice acting came into the picture, the less Bethesda was in their comfort zone.
In short, I think Bethesda's game model didn't scale with graphics cards. They were pressured to keep up graphically, but there was no way to do that with their old game engine mechanics, and they failed to adapt. All of that stuff takes money, and lots of it, because you need to hire artists and voice actors. Back in the Daggerfall days you only needed a MIDI sound designer, a few 2D artists, a writer, and a clever programmer. No longer.
You can't let a RNG build a town (or landscape) using high detail models, all kinds of collisions and disasters occur. So instead, on Bethesda's budget…you get a dead static world that looks pretty.
shamed that they lie be bringing the false argument that is the lack of money
It's not a lie. Daggerfall had hundreds of unique towns, each with dozens of buildings. This is easy to do with 2d rotating trees and NPCs (that always appear normal because the texture surface is orthagonal to the player's view) and RNG copy/paste dungeon and town creation algorithms. Nowadays they would need to hire an army of artists and designers to make these things by hand, there just isn't an algorithm out there that can render 3D environments on such a massive scale and have it look remotely realistic.
This is why WoW was built using a low-polygon 'cartoony' style, Blizzard was smart in understanding that their design costs would grow exponentially with level of detail. So they kept that factor low and controlled, which allowed them to spend money perfecting the actual game. That's where Blizzard succeeded, and Bethesda has failed.
Here's a good interview with Ken Rolston touching on some of these issues:
"brittle production features"…"accepting conventions and limitations"
