I think Skyrim had its day 15 years ago and just wouldn't be good enough today. I think if their next game is a minor upgrade on Skyrim it'll get panned. The voice acting, animations and characters were clunky and a bit cheap and dead inside even then. I think a lot of the stories were buried in scraps of paper in a cave in a random corner of the map (almost like elden ring
). I loved the game 15 years ago enough to play it for about 500 hours or something crazy but it's been surpassed by huge distances in the mean time. Witcher 3 being the most obvious case.
I adored Elden Rings world. Honestly i've probably watched 30+ hours of youtube or reddit rabbit holes associated with it. I've probably spent an hour or two scrolling through my inventory to read item descriptions semi often when playing the game. Its a terrible way of delivering a story but my god is it an interesting world. Its dense and honestly a lot of it requires you to fill in the blanks yourself, it can be interpreted very differently depending on your view. But i think thats kind of interesting. You kind of piece together a narrative yourself and then you hear how someone else interpreted different parts and find 'oh thats quite an interesting way to look at it, i didn't think of that' and you kind of stitch together this weird quilt out of the bits the game gives you, how you want to view it yourself and other bits you steal from other people. And lots of guessing based on being familiar with GRRM and Miyazaki.
I kind of like the consistency of from's worlds too. Like they have in an universe explanation for how you can die and come back to life at a nearby bonfire or site of grace for instance and that kind of extends out to every element of the game. So secrets of the gameworld are secret and are buried at the bottom of an optional crypt miles out of the way, they're not hand delivered to you. Random townsfolk miles from the capital have no opinion on the King, they've never seen the king, they've never seen the capital for that matter in a lot of cases. The only people who know anything about the king have an in universe reason to know about him.
I guess i'm overlooking that his hat knows quite a bit about him and has a long message attached to it. Thats a definite weakness, its basically the elder scrolls book in a cave with a diary of the vampires plan to takeover nearby town. I dont know, beating them in a boss fight feels like a good time to reveal a few bits of lore from a gamey point of view and their weapons or armor telling you something about them feels a passable explanation.