There was a very brief window where it was possible to make games like this - where the game market was large enough to spend time making an expansive game, but before the demand for highly polished games came in.

Daggerfall was the game in line before Morrowind and it had a lot more freedom, but it was a lot less polished and more glitchy. But there was so much you could do - you could set a teleport spell in the daytime towards a shop, teleport in at night, and rob the shop. That's the kind of thing that makes a lot of sense that players always want to do in a game like that, and Daggerfall let you do it.

But it was broken at times, dungeons would load broken configurations, and the game wasn't polished with finesse. Morrowind is a much, much more polished and overall satisfying experience than Daggerfall, but it's much more streamlined (though, still immense amounts of freedom compared to a normal game).

There's other games that offer a great deal of freedom - Baldur's Gate and Darklands come to mind. They came after the games market had started to get much bigger, but before the standard became extremely polished. It'll be good if there's a trend back towards more freedom, and eventually someone will get pseudorandom design and encounters right in terms of polish. I've largely moved on from games, but if someone can give a Darklands amount of depth in a game with as many different choices as Fallout 2 and as much polish as a modern game - well, I might have to block out a month at some point to waste a lot of time with it. But, this seems like it's still quite a ways off.