There was a very brief window where it was possible to make games like this - where the game market was large enough to spend time making an expansive game, but before the demand for highly polished games came in.<p>Daggerfall was the game in line before Morrowind and it had <i>a lot</i> more freedom, but it was a lot less polished and more glitchy. But there was so much you could do - you could set a teleport spell in the daytime towards a shop, teleport in at night, and rob the shop. That's the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense that players always want to do in a game like that, and Daggerfall let you do it.<p>But it was broken at times, dungeons would load broken configurations, and the game wasn't polished with finesse. Morrowind is a much, much more polished and overall satisfying experience than Daggerfall, but it's much more streamlined (though, still immense amounts of freedom compared to a normal game).<p>There's other games that offer a great deal of freedom - Baldur's Gate and Darklands come to mind. They came after the games market had started to get much bigger, but before the standard became extremely polished. It'll be good if there's a trend back towards more freedom, and eventually someone will get pseudorandom design and encounters right in terms of polish. I've largely moved on from games, but if someone can give a Darklands amount of depth in a game with as many different choices as Fallout 2 and as much polish as a modern game - well, I might have to block out a month at some point to waste a lot of time with it. But, this seems like it's still quite a ways off.