A thought that came to my mind after watching this 'dumbing down' video on TES. (Though these three main things can be apply to other open-world RPGs as well. Not just TES).

Simply put. "The Game World", "Playability", and "Player Interaction".

The Game World covers not just the 'physical' game world but also the interactions which can happen in it between NPCs and other elements. This would also include a lot of other things as well but it is really a huge list...

Playability is basically about combat, controls, menus, and a lot of other similar stuff.

Lastly, player interaction is all about the player's hand in the game. This including dialogue, quests, and many other aspects to that nature.

And after thinking about it for some time... I feel Skyrim got at least two of these either "Right" or at least "Pretty Good". While the third one Skyrim failed at. (Take a guess which one it is?). While Morrowind is the opposite... Morrowind for the first two wrong or at least uncomfortable while the third one is amazing. As for Oblivion... In my opinion, Oblivion is not in the middle... Oblivion is chaos. I feel Oblivion has no idea what it's doing half the time. Sometimes, it feels right for all three in Oblivion and others it feels totally wrong... Making Oblivion either easily hated or easily loved in general while Skyrim and Morrowind can be hated, or loved, for specific reasons.

Note: I'm sticking to the newest three TES games simply because they are the most played.

My opinion: I play Skyrim as more of a game. I play it to get into the world, mess around, and have fun. Morrowind is more of a book, or story... I play Morrowind to get into the story of the game as well as the story behind the series (FYI: Lore). Oblivion I don't play at all anymore.

So by this concept... What are you thoughts?

I do the same thing. But it's because I usually feel forced by Skyrim to make up my own stories.

I make up my own stories in Oblivion and Morrowind too...but I do it by choice. I feel forced by Skyrim to supply my own invention to make up for certain deficiencies in game design.

My roleplaying can get pretty eccentric at times. I come up with a lot of weird character ideas and off-the-wall stories. I find that this "breaks" Skyrim. It can't adapt to my style of roleplaying as easily as the previous two games.

Morrowind, on the whole, is more likely to support my roleplaying than the later two games. I'm less likely to have to ignore chunks of the game in order to tell my character's story.

Oblivion, for me, is somewhere in between. It supports my roleplaying more than Skyrim but less than Morrowind.