I live in Canada and I have no idea what you are talking about with regards to the Canadian economy being in tatters. Perhaps you should be paying closer attention to the actual media.
Your reality check comment is giving me hardcore "Fake News" vibes but I'll lave it at that.
This take is bordering on delusional. It's the annexation threats, trade war, internal collapse of law and order, border issues, and complete disrespect towards a close ally.
I've played all of the mentioned games except modern Final Fantasy titles and I think it's a big disservice to the TW3 to say it's at best on par with those games.
The only way I could imagine saying that is if you focus only on the mechanics of the RPG game loop and ignore world design, dialog quality, voice acting, characters, breadth of content, quests, etc.
Gamers typically use VoiceAttack[1] for voice control in gaming. It uses the built in Windows 10/8/7? speech recognition system and layers macros and basic programming on top of it.
The Creation engine by Bethesda is still highly mod friendly. For example, there is a fan-made total conversion mod being created for TES V: Skyrim that is a remake of TES III: Morrowind [1]. Also, the SureAI team is creating Enderal, a total conversion mod in a completely different setting [2].