just compare some comments Bethesda guys gave before Oblivion was released ...
"Fantasy, for us, is a knight on horseback running around and killing things"
"However, with Morrowind I think we saw that our kind of game appeals to a wider audience, given the game’s success among more casual gamers who are neither "hardcore" nor "RPG geeks"
"So even though we have this really deep RPG, we recognized that no matter how many parts the game has -- combat is the number one thing people do a lot of, so we need to make it great."