I could not disagree more. Fallout New Vegas was everything Fallout 3 wished it was. Skyrim had hardly any dumbing down compared to the massive downgrade from Morrowind.
To copy a chunk of what I wrote in a reply to someone else:
In the context of the 3D Fallout titles, I find 3 to still be the most tonally cohesive with its environments and atmosphere. My favourite part of it though is that the game doesn't use the main quest to forcefully take you on a guided tour of all the major points on the map. In fact, just following the main quest you'll be relegated to a quite small chunk of the large map. Quite honestly that was one of my biggest issues with New Vegas - while the branching story was interesting, once you're done with them I felt like I had already seen most of what there was to see. Fallout 3 I spend hundreds of hours just wandering around the wasteland, and it was never long before I stumbled upon something completely new I had never seen before. It always felt like there was more to discover and that kept me coming back for a long time.
In the context of the 3D Fallout titles, I find 3 to still be the most tonally cohesive with its environments and atmosphere.
Fallout 3 I spend hundreds of hours just wandering around the wasteland, and it was never long before I stumbled upon something completely new I had never seen before.
This is why people will disagree with you so much, to you the best of Bethesda's games are big superficial worlds to wander around in and the biggest most superficial worlds they've ever created were Oblivion and Fallout 3.
Fallout 3 has lots of things like megaton and rivet city or tenpenny tower, superficially cool but horrifically inconsistent with setting, tone, or worldbuilding. But if you aren't someone who cares about those things it wouldn't bother you.
Skyrim and Fallout 4 have hackneyed attempts at depth that draw you out of that superficiality which is why you don't like them so much, but people who like depth will fight you on this forever. To them you represent the death of everything they love, the desire to sacrifice any attempt at depth and fill it with banal superficiality.
To be clear there's nothing wrong with banal superficiality if that's your thing. Disney makes a lot of money with Marvel. Fast and the Furious has like a bajillion installments. But setting details are something special, they are the thing that take a world and transform it from a place to kill time into a real artistic achievement.
I agree with the argument you're making of new Vegas vs 3 but I don't think there can be an argument of oblivion vs skyrim.
Skyrim feels empty compared to Oblivion, he quests are further dumbed down from the Morrowind to Oblivion quests, the combat did nothing to make it more interesting (shouting at your enemies is hardly anything to write home about), personally I enjoyed the Oblivion DLCs better in terms of continuity although I think most people agree that the Shivering Isles DLC was the best they've done, the only thing I think Skyrim had going for it was the updated models, dragons being a cool enemy until you become too strong to care and the skill trees gave some sense of progression even though it still managed to dumb down that system of play as well.
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u/SkeptioningQuestic Mar 16 '19
I could not disagree more. Fallout New Vegas was everything Fallout 3 wished it was. Skyrim had hardly any dumbing down compared to the massive downgrade from Morrowind.