In Skyrim the main quest constantly tells you about how urgent it is for you to do the next steps. You must heed the summoning of the greybeards, you must hurry along to the dragon graveyard. Time is constantly of the essence.

And then every other part of the game encourages you to goof around.

Oblivion is the same with this. Morrowind went the opposite direction with the story at times pretty much telling you to goof around for a bit before continuing the main quest (probably because people were less used to open world games maybe?).

I think daggerfall had you on actual timers so if you weren’t at the correct locations in time the game would be impossible to complete. Which sure is a way to resolve the false sense of urgency lmao.