What I loved about Morrowind was all the crazy beasts and races that were everywhere! Dreugh's, Guars', Kagouti and Netch to name a fucking few... Then the Daedra and Dwemer and Ash creatures too! Never before have I played a game with such indepth lore and stunning imagination. Vvardenfell was (to put it simply) a utopia for a RPG-er. The politics (Redoran, Hlaalu and Telvanni) coupled with the religion (Nerevarine, Imperial Cult of the Nine Divines) just made it fucking awesome...
I think the problem that game industries are facing today is this dichotomy between graphics/engine/detail and the actual lore/story/environment of their games. As they push for better graphics (in a better engine, requiring more talented artists) the lore/story slider gradually shrinks until you get story lines such as: "King has been killed, go here, find secret heir to the throne, omg demons are invading, kill them all"...
My main point still stands. Graphics engines are more or less stabilizing at an upper limit (mostly defined by what the latest generation of consoles and affordable desktop rigs can handle). And as all these graphics engines all reach the same depth of realism (anti-aliasing, ray-tracing, physics, particle systems, etc) games begin to look similar. Through no fault of the designers or content creators, it is just the boundaries of the current technology which cause all the fancy features (photon mapping, normal/occlusion mapping, etc) to sort of blend and merge styles together.
Take a look at the image (from the Article) that I posted earlier - the texture/hair/fur is 99% identical to the Werewolves in Dragon Age: Origins. Now, while these games have been built by two completely different high-end developers, since the technology is stabilizing (as it were), there results in striving for realism have (perhaps coincidentally) turned out very similar.
What (in my humble opinion) Skyrim has to do to truly stand out from it's competition (of which there is a lot) is capitalize on the gameplay and storyline. Basically, recreate the best parts of Morrowind, merge them with the best parts of Oblivion and put them in an entirely new engine and game environment: Skyrim. But knowing Bethesda's history, they will most likely hire a bunch of expensive celebrity voice actors and focus on making the game look amazing - with which I have nothing against. It's just when you have such high expectations from a software developer, you begin to doubt and become skeptical. Let us not forget that there has just been a global recession and the entertainment industry is always the first (and hardest) to get hit.
If ZeniMax / Bethesda are not 100% focussed on making Skyrim appeal to the casual console kiddies as well as the hardcore TESV fans - and of course, they have to make compromises along the way (no child violence, no sex trade, no massive quantities of skooma, no slavery etc)... This in turn keeps the rating down and widens the potential market for their game - another thing I have absolutely no problem with.
Worst case scenario for Skyrim? I buy it, I play it, I like it. Best case scenario? Very unlikely.
Edit (ninja'd by Fisty): I agree entirely. The less budget wasted on hiring voice actors the better in my opinion. If you're going to tell a story through a game, make it all text-based. Have us read the dialogues in our own voices and use our own imaginations for once. This is the one feature which made Morrowind a cut above the rest. But again, the likelyhood of this happening is about 1 in 1,000,000. Dragon Age 2 is already boasting 100% voiced main character dialog.
None.