This is the game Bethesda is easily most well-known for, mainly for becoming such a staple on consoles as well as the insane modding community. This is also the last time they truly bothered to write anything, but here's what I think defines a "Bethesda game"

Picture this, you have this entire questline rife with symbolism (however deep or shallow it may be), but easily your fan-favorite is the oddball dragon Paarthurnax. He's the first or one of the first of the dragons to defect from his kind and reach enlightenment, and despite his help for people who largely hate him they plot to kill him anyways.

>The Blades say you deserve to die.
"The Blades are wise not to trust me. Oniikan na ov. I would not trust another Dovah."
>Why shouldn't they trust you?
"Dov wahlaan fah rel. We were born to dominate. The will to power is in our blood. You feel it in yourself, do you not? I can be trusted, I know this, but they do not. Oniikan ni ov Dovah, it is always wise to distrust a Dovah. I have overcome my nature only through meditation and long study of the Way of the Voice. No day goes by where I am not tempted to return to my inborn nature. Zin krif harvut suleyk...
What is better - to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?"

You are given no options to answer, and the dialogue loops here until you're forced to kill Paarthurnax to complete the questline. Simply searching "Paarthurnax" can autocomplete to "Paarthurnax dilemma" which is one of the most popular Skyrim mods of all time, simply granting you a button at the end of this dialogue to spare Paarthurnax and force complete the questline.

To me that is a Bethesda game, having nearly transcendental moments in lore or story only to put you back on the rails at the last second. This is the Todd vision, to tease player agency only in the form of linking checkboxes together which have little to no impact on each other, crystalized in its purest form of quite literally narrating freedom of nature vs confine of expectation. Anything else is a neat little bonus for exploiting computer game nerd attention to detail like buckets on heads or carrying the valuable away to a corner before "stealing" it undetected, and their not so secret reliance on modders to make the game tolerable past its initial hype window. (+0.5~* for the modding scene btw)

But that's what some people like, and more recently readily admit with the lukewarm launch of Starfield; "you don't play it because it's good, you play it because it's a Bethesda game." they'll keep saying as what little charm there is in Bethesda is ripped away with each proceeding entry after this. I deeply enjoy Skyrim's "little diorama world", as one put it, but Starfield is an endless wall of loading screens and disconnected levels "planets". Why even bother?