Why hasnt any dev studio been able to dethrone Bethesda?

I really do hope it gets off the ground, Daggerfall is great for what it is but too many people these days are turned off by the ancient DOS-era controls

real world is not comfy and also fantasy games don't have plastic bottles everywhere

when was the last time you actually went into a nature preserve and hiked around? at least a few hundred yards away from any kind of road?

Spoken like someone who never goes into nature.

Might and Magic.

>Nobody wants a dev kit styled game as a main title and at most want a side expansion that does so.
what?

I mean, if you were waiting for skyrim (and for tes6) to play the game itself, then all the more power to you
I personally very, very much enjoy those styles of games, or rather, when a game has a good/okay base and an absolutely enormous modding potential, and so does a lot of other people
again, the fact that these games were mod friendly is why I (and others) bought them, such as terraria/starbound, or the TES/fallouts, or the klei games, or even minecraft (though this one got popular due to them but then completely exploded when going multiplatform)

>you just have to not make it DRM
mate, are you actually seriously honestly genuinely implying that modding tools aren't that important for a modding scene to appear?

look at DS3, it's only now getting modding tools, but the fad has passed and so there's maybe ten percent of people capable and willing to make mods for a game they have uninstalled years ago
compare that to fallout whose' gecko (or whatever the new one is called) that got hundreds of mods during the first week, and both those games were just as popular as the other so it's not a case of AAA vs indie either

modding tools are extremely important to assure your game's modding community grow, even better if they're so easy to use even the average retard can have fun with (like the bethesda tools)
nobody like to wait for two years for some tech wizard to cook up some tools and other .bat to decompress and re-pack gamefiles and shit
and sure people would find a way anyways, but you can't and shouldn't compare skyrim's modding scene to DS' or any other game without any modding tools, really

the modding community tend to be infested with fragile egos that throw temper tantrums when someone else uses a tiny bit of content of theirs for a bigger mod (even when they give credit where it's due)

You have got no clue what you're talking about.

Nah. Imagine Bethesda games even emptier, with combat just as bad and even more microtransactions. Rockstar is just as cucked.

At least the main campaign might be good, but then, GTAV's was shit.

No other company tries to take what Bethesda has. Bethesda has a monopoly on open world "rpgs" with a priority on decent modding tools.
Not even CD Project Red or Obsidian are doing it with Cyberpunk or Outer Worlds, the only one that is recently is Bloodlines 2 which means it'll probably be really successful and a good game no matter how fucked it is after like 3 years.