As someone who logged 880+ hours into Oblivion back in my day... I can't say I do anymore. I fell out of love with them. Oblivion was my first. Morrowind was what I decided to come back to in the long, long death march between '06 and '11 for a new one. And, sure, Fallout 3 was grand, but I only logged about 211 hours total into that one. '10 brought New Vegas, and with it, a new standard for what quality looked like in that kind of game. Sure, it was buggy, sure, it was ugly, and there was no other way it could have been when you read about what that dev cycle was like. But ultimately? It had an even more compelling sense of verisimilitude than anything in regular Bethsoft games.
Look. Personal opinion? Morrowind was their best by far. It was a perfect storm. Pre-MW games had Julian LeFay as their lead designer-- and his mark and design sensibilities are strongly felt. He's the reason why Daggerfall has its own banking simulation system and a proc-gen landmass the size of England. His games were still a buggy mess, don't get me wrong--but his drive was towards fantasy sim, above all. After the Zenimax acquisition and subsequent shift in leadership, Todd Howard takes the reins. And his vision is different-- he was the project lead on Redguard previously, and we can see from his cinematic action take on the Elder Scrolls series that he as a designer prefers the tack of shaving off what he perceives to be cruft-- get rid of what you don't need. Now, what's fascinating about this is, because he's starting from Daggerfall, he has just so much fluff to try and get through that what he retains ends up being a compelling, and well-rounded set of options. On top of that, his propensity for flash does help in upgrading the game's visual style, and anybody who's ever seen the uncompressed textures for MW knows they had an eye towards visual fidelity at the time they, at a technical level, weren't able to meet in-engine. Add to that the frantic mysticism of Michael Kirkbride and you have a recipe for an unforgettable world.
The problem is, Todd's subtraction of gameplay features doesn't ever really stop. Do we really need spears when we already have a pokey weapon in the form of swords? Do we really need crossbows when we have bows? Do towns really need to be in the same cell as the outside world? That's not to say he didn't attempt some forms of technical innovation in Oblivion-- their commitment to a larger world size than that of Morrowind is one of those things which ended up hobbling them, as they tried using procedurally generated landscapes and dungeons to pad beyond what their labor could really deal with. The innovation we got for Oblivion was mostly unhelpful. The persuasion wheel was not an improvement to the world-- the procgen didn't produce a compelling landscape because it produced mostly eroded features. Ultimately, their curated content here is still what shines. Emil Pagliarulo's Dark Brotherhood questline remains among the gold standard for quests in Bethesda games, and Bruce Nesmith's sheer experience in the field of fantasy, both in Bethesda and back in TSR makes even the woefully generic retconned Cyrodiil something close to enjoyable. And that retconned Cyrodiil wouldn't be so painful if we hadn't had in-universe guides to the Imperial City that blow out of the water anything actually delivered to us. In general, as Kirkbride's influence diminished from its peak in Morrowind, I think the lore for Bethesda really suffered.
When we get into Fallout, well... Bethesda's take on the franchise is, I'd suggest, woefully lacking. For one, I'd say the setting becomes troped up to the gills in ways the first two FO games weren't. The Fifties optimism gets the crank turned up to max, when it wasn't really that much of a thing outside of the openings of the first two games. In a way, Fallout 1 was more of an Eighties homage than a Fifties homage-- the Fifties stuff comes from the obsession the Eighties had with that time period and its glamorization and callbacks to an actually-pretty-dark period in the country's history meant to hearken to some moral core that never existed. Fallout points out that the Old World is a hellhole to live in. So Bethesda's obsession with Fifties kitsch is kind of weird-- especially since, when it comes to apocalyptic fiction, the original series went buck wild with bringing in a number of allusions. The choice to prioritize THE WONDERS OF THE ATOM style gunk over, say, the Mad Max insanity of drugs and leather that's every bit as present in the original FO1 is strange and only really understandable as a way to emphasize FO's uniqueness as a post-apoc setting. Not to say that there isn't still plenty of post-apocalyptic homage of different types even in FO3 or 4-- but the emphasis is on a different syllable, to put it some other way. FO1 and 2 had plenty of Eighties homage. There's a reason the G11 is a superweapon, and That Gun is That Gun From Blade Runner. To compound my issues with the series after Bethesda acquired it, the writing's all weird. Emil Pagliarulo got an upgrade from writing side quests to writing the main quest-- and with the knowledge that he was behind the "I've got to find my dad" plot of 3 AND the "I've got to find my son" plot of 4... I gotta... say... like... the guy's writing is pretty tropey. Oblivion's DB quest was great, but it works because its twist is a Psycho pastiche mixed in with a horror thriller. The tropes are out-of-genre and because of that, it manages to pack the surprise that it does. By comparison, EmilPags kinda sticks to post-apoc tropes in an almost paint-by-numbers fashion. You've got the radio deejay with a good heart fighting the good fight... although he's fighting it before the Enclave come on the scene, so it's not clear against who. You've got the weird post-apocalyptic cargo cults, and societies that evolved strange rules like Little Lamplight... and it's all just kind of artificial. The out-of-genre pulls in sidequests just don't land so well. Cosmic horror is kind of cool, I guess, but why's it in a game about the horrors of nuclear war? And why'd they double down on that with Pickman in 4? Lonesome Road got it right-- you want an ancient evil slumbering underground? You've got it. It's ICBMs. The tone is nailed. I played about 210 hours of Fallout 3 in total. I did about 25 hours of 4, didn't even finish the main quest.
Let's hop back to Skyrim. I logged 120 hours of that game by the end of 2011, having completed the main quest. I freebased that game. For a month and a half or so, I lived and breathed Skyrim. And then I hated it all at once and have not played it since. Jeremy Soule putting in the leitmotif of Morrowind to the big hub city can only do so much for so log. The gameplay design sensibilities of that game just kept shaving stuff down. Spell creation's pared down, birth signs are gone, skills are wacky compared to what they were... and complexity is only added back as DLC. It's just not a great situation. Dialog options are frequently binary, leaving little opportunity for roleplay. You can either be this Daedra's enthusiastic and willing servant, or you can be a zealot hating everything they stand for, with little nuance. That one still gets me from Hermaeus Mora quest. Once again I felt the absence of a big spark of creativity, the world still feeling more generic than anything else. And the quest writing just didn't get to be as good as even the highs of Oblivion! Ultimately there's just not a lot there.
The more and more Bethesda's gone on, the more alienated I've felt from their products. I don't resent their success at all-- if you couldn't tell, I'm such a huge fan I can actually put names to quests and faces to names. Their community director's a great guy. But I just don't feel like the games they make now have quite the same energy that they used to-- and I suspect that energy might have been a fluke in the first place.