Casual gaming laptop recs

Looking for a reliable gaming laptop I can run old and newish games on, as well as use for daily life. I’m an occasional gamer so I don’t need all the bells and whistles. I play Skyrim (and elder scrolls 6 Godwilling…), newer fallouts, sims 4/city, will potentially play COD but probably nothing after MW3.

I’d like to stay around $1000 but if it seems worth it I’ll go up to $1500. I know to go for an AMD Ryzen or IntelCore processor, but that’s about where my knowledge of PCs stop. The Asus and Lenovo gaming lines seem legit and good, but there are so many models and configurations I’m not sure what direction to go in. Are they legit? Are there other brands I should be looking at?

Thanks in advance!