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Notes -
It's a collection of ridiculously short stories. Designing for open-world play maximizing player freedom means having lots of independent quest lines, none of which can be hastened by a training montage or a time skip. The power-fantasy "Chosen One" trope means that many of those arcs are expected to scale from stranger-off-the-street origins at the beginning to change-the-world consequences at the end. Designing for the player to get to experience all those quests means they need to be individually short enough that the game as a whole can be considered "completed" within 40 or 50 hours. And yet this is a game, so even with fast travel the vast majority of those hours are going to be gameplay.
Put that all together, and the next thing you know your axe-wielding barbarian who learned a few spells is getting made the Arch Mage, and your suspension of disbelief is shattered.
The first doesn't follow from the second. Oblivion had open world play and was somewhat infamous for having better side quests (notably the guild storylines) than the main quest.
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