I agree, but they are games with different design goals. New Vegas was a RPG, Fallout 3 and the rest of Bethesda's games are open world dungeon crawlers. Skyrim no longer even tries to hide that

Not in any lifetime of ours, they won't

Who said NV didn't have a good story? It's one of the most deep and complex RPG I've ever had the privilege to play. Skyrim's story has the framework of something interesting but doesn't follow through. Hell you'd think they could take a cue, remember how popular and touching the Survivalist's story is? That wasn't even an actual quest.

As for the argument that if they did they same old thing over again it wouldn't sell then you've obviously never heard of Modern Warfare. I'm not saying they should go back to the combat, magic, and archery system of old but take a cue from yourself and create a world where the politics you mention actually have an effect. Also maybe interesting characters, to this day I still remember Crassius Curio because of his personality and how it seemed to clash with his moves against corruption.

Key player? Since Oblivion, basically. Which is about when everything started to go to hell.

He was a Project Leader of Morrowind, which has little to do with design. Before Morrowind he only did "Additional Design".

I did pretty much everything over the course of three characters. I only did the main quest three times and all the guilds on one character one time. I keep my guilds seperate from each character because its silly that i can become the head of everything in skyrim. I never got to level 81 not even close because once you get past level 50 nothing scales any more and there is no increase in difficulty. Level 35-40 is the norm for my characters to retire. I just start over with another character and take a different path. Generally my playstyle is to play "pieces" of the game with different characters, I even go so far as to have my Nord focus on the nothern and rural parts and my imperial is a more cosmopolitan who sticks mostly around cities..........yes i have a compulsive issue with roleplaying characters that make sense. So basically no single character has ever completed the whole game nor will it ever happen for me. My character isn't THAT special.

Have i done every enchantment?......why would I? Why would i bother with a frost enchantment when frost trolls, ancient dragons, icewraiths and draugr are everywhere. I used the ones that made sense like absorb health or fire damage.

Why would i pick up every book........I have read most of them in oblivion and morrowind.and there weren't that many new ones that i encountered.

I talked to every npc i could find in every town i could find. It sounds to me like you are just trying to make a false argument for arguments sake. At most ive missed a few hours of hidden quests somewhere out in the corners of the map. The one thing that this game does do well is it makes you go all over skyrims and i tend to stop and explore any locations along the way. If I powergamed i probably could beat the main quest and the guilds and the daedric and large city quests in less than 40 hours easy. This game is by no means overflowing with quests. The only time i fast travel is by carriage or if i do something really stupid like forget a claw key somewhere. so sue me.

I liked FONV more than fall out three, but mainly cause the gun combat was better. But I finished FONV in about 45 hours. My first Skyrim playthrough was over 160 hours, and i only stopped playing that cause the lag on ps3 got so bad. Now i'm about 80 hours in on my second play through and i'm still loving it. While FONV did a solid job with its branching stories, it was lacking in content over all. Just when i got powerful enough to really want fight stuff, there was nothing to fight. I'll take 160's of Skyrim over 45 hours of NV

What a foolish, self-centered, intolerant, asinine justification for a pathetic and unfounded claim and overbearing arrogance of blind opinion.

45 hours? That's seriously short. Did you only do the main quest? I remember putting over 100 hours into NV and that was before the DLC.

Sounds like most of the Skyrim hate around here.

To the OP, I don't know what you're talking about. Skyrim is a much more detailed and alive world than FO3, and I loved that game, too. Or were you not around for the howls of derision and outrage before Broken Steel came out and changed the ending?

FNV feels way more alive then Skyrim IMO. More consequence to your actions with more options in how to influence them through dialog and moral choices make its world feel more alive. A seemingly living ecosystem and Radiant auto generated quests do not.

i agree, while i enjoy skyrim, Fallout 3 i simply adore. rivet city was riveting and i found myself taking a huge personal interest in Fallout

I have really enjoyed playing Skyrim, Fallout3, Oblivion and Morrowind.
FO:NV though just didn't appeal to me. It had some very memorable, well-made quests with interesting options and dialogue, but I found the world itself to be a bit lacklustre with few places to explore. It did well as a story-game like Dragon Age or the Witcher, but like those didn't offer the same sort of open world experience.

No, not really but hey, they say love is blind, isn't it?

I've said it before and I'll say it again - New Vegas could only work this way because it had a DEFINITIVE ENDING that showed you what the consequences of all your actions were and designed many side quests as reflecting the build-up to the final outcome. Reflecting the outcome of four big choices as to what would happen would have been impossible with post MQ play. IMO the TES fanbase is it's own worst enemy by expecting a never ending sandbox game which means Bethesda will always have a linear MQ and neglect real choice in favour of 'you can play in this world forever and nothing you do will bring the story to a definitive climix'. IMO TES would be better if it was designed like NV where you are bu9ilding to a big climix where you make real choices and then that's it - you choose to end the story and find out what the consequences of all your decisions were. Consequences that have a variety of possible highly significant outcomes. But the blunt fact is the community would be apoplectic if they ever went down that route.

you know, it's possible to have the game save the moment you accomplish your last objective, show an ending, and then resume right where it saved, with a "main quest over" flag set, right? Obviously, quests you haven't done would show no effect, but overcoming the obstacle is soooo difficult that 90% of my action-y games have the technique built in... for virtually no reason!

It's lovely how people compare FO3/TES to FNV in exploration aspect when it was never designed as an exploration game in the first place.
Yeah, it has a sandbox.
Yeah, it has exploration aspect.
But it was developed by Obsidian, not Bethesda, and while it has those elements of gameplay it was not those it catered to.
Since this thread is about "Where did Bethesda go wrong?" shouldn't you guys and gals comment on products Bethesda actually developed and not debate FONV's design?

Just saying, it's the wrong debate in the wrong forum.

As a FNV lover and a FO3 critic and Skyrim "meh"'er even I'll say that of course Bethesda does better exploration than Obsidian does and that FNV shrinks like if it's in a cold shower when compared to FO3 and Skyrim's exploration gameplay.

But as this thread was about Bethesda products:
Here is where Bethesda wen't wrong; Remember Vanilla Fallout 3? The game with 17 sidequests? The game with 3 large "settlements" and about 5 minor settlements? The game with about what? 70 characters?
Yeah, Bethesda decided that quantity is better than quality.
That's where they went wrong, they should have had 50/50 of both, instead they chose to develop a game with a [censored]load of stuff that are ridiculously simplistic.

However, there's nothing to replay in Skyrim at all. Once you do a quest, you basically did it with the exception of a few.(dark brotherhood for one) In Fallout though, every quest has multiple endings and more variation of dialogue. Plus there are four main factions instead of two you can side with. So while Skyrim may have more quests, they are all shallow, one time things.

I just wish i had Fawkes with me in Skyrim as a follower. lol
He was one bad mofo

FO3 and NV also felt more alive because there was people traveling along trade routes brahmin caravans, brotherhood patrols. Aside from the overly used Thalmor/Imperials escorting a prisoner or the wandering minstrel guy I encounter almost nobody.

Last night I saw an Imperial patrol escorting a prisoner just outside of Windhelm...

Turn up the difficulty. Problem solved.

Yes, both Morrowind and Oblivion has this, Morrowind gives you a tile and clean weather in the blight, Oblivion closes the gates and changes the temple.

However it's hard to do major changes, Fallout Broken steel had major changes and was an dlc in it's own, no it did not have multiple versions based on earlier choices.

What happened? They got much better. RAGE was my only disappointment. I think RAGE should never have happened and that Bethesda would have worked on Skyrim to add much more depth into it.

Bethesda didn't make Rage. They only published it. The game was made by id software.