I just found this on Todd Howard at wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Howard
His major seems to ne finance; that would explain a lot, I think
:
Here's the entry for Bethesda Softworks:
http://rpgcodex.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php ... sc&start=0
Bethesda was bought in 1999 by Zenimax Media, and Weawer (the orihinal founder of Bethesda was thrown out a later date, maybe in 2001-2002?).
I believe it was first after Weawer's leaving the company that Todd Howard became Executive producer at Bethesda Softworks, or maybe it was in 1999-2000. Anyway, the point is that Morrowins probably alreadu were well underway when he took over as executive producer for Morrowind.
Morrowind feels more like one man's design decisio; that man is Ken Rolston.
If you look at the history of Bethesda Softworks, even Weaeverm (who founded the company) was interested in getting the physics of real life into games; Gridironm is talked about in the wiki entry.
'Momentum, mass,deflection etc...' was talked about by Weaver; the salient point being that Bethesda Softworks have history of making games, or trying to make games, that reflects the real physical world. Hence, Todd's remark about 'living another life, in another world'.
You can hate Todd Goward, all you will. I don't. I still think Oblivion does something right as do Fallout 3. It is far far better to have a developer that tries something new than a developer or a publisher that just churns out the same game year after year, but with updated graphics - (yes, sims games, I'm looking at you --- and other EA games as well...)
Look at it this way:
Every RPG dev. and publisher need money. Back in 2004-2006 (and probably also today?) the money lay with the console games.Oblivion, for all its fault, is a more streamlines game, at least in the user interface compared to Morrowind. This is not dumbing down, this is smart business. Oblivion (and Morrowind) are games in which you can jump right in and play; they are easy to learn, but hard to master. And the console gamers got games with a decent story and complex designs they haven't had before.
The point here is that Bethesda Softworks needs to make games that sell well, or else they will soon be out of business...