One is high fantasy, the other is satire. They may be technically very similar, but as far as tone and mood they are very different beasts. Like Star Wars and Spaceballs.

I think my first Bethesda game was Skyrim

Side note, fuck am I old. 🥲 My first Bethesda games were Where’s Waldo, Terminator and then a bit later Elder Scrolls: Arena. It was always sad to see how far the concept had actually fallen von the lofty heights of the Arena->Daggerfall jump and what it promised. Morrowind felt like a big reduction in scope but in return added a lot, so it felt okay. Then came Oblivion and that solidified the route that led to Skyrim and most post-Skyrim open world designs.

I think what you’re feeling might just be… open-world realization? The fact that open games are naturally less engaging? The whole “Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle”-thing?

The big difference between the two for me is how much feeling of gameplay expression there is. In Fallout, my options feel like melee, shooting enemies with shotguns, shooting enemies with automatic rifles, shooting enemies with long-range rifles, shooting enemies with lasers, shooting enemies with miniguns, and so on. And the shooting mechanics don’t feel strong enough to really differentiate those different weapons as different playstyles for the most part. If I play a game like Titanfall, Battlefield, etc, then changing weapons can feel drastically different - they handle differently, you navigate combat arenas differently, you prioritise targets differently, you use cover differently. But that doesn’t really feel like the case with Fallout for me without any of the moment-to-moment decision making that tends to allow for gameplay expression in shooters.

Whereas Skyrim feels like there are a lot more playstyles available. Destruction magic feels very different to conjuration which feels very different to illusion which feels very different to being a stealth archer which feels very different to using a dagger which feels very different to using a huge, two-handed melee weapon. They’re not just visually different; how you approach and navigate combat encounters will be significantly different depending on what kind of build you have. It just feels like there’s so much more gameplay depth.

I feel the same and I think I’ve narrowed it down to a handful of things, in no particular order.

1. The environment design. Fallout is mostly wastelands, with just a few settlements scattered around. Everyone is fighting each other, plus the monsters that are encroaching on civilization. Everything is a shabby remnant of the past shoddily cobbled together. Even the entire settlement system in Fallout 4 is based on gathering scrap and taping it together. In Skyrim, you can mine and process the minerals to make the nails to put your house together. Skyrim has ruins and remnants of past civilizations, but a lot of the buildings and infrastructure are still in good condition, and there’s fresh growth. The wilds of Skyrim are much more diverse than the wastes of Fallout. Fallout 3 in particular has the annoying green filter on everything unless you mod it out. It doesn’t feel like there’s really a world left to save- it seems like everything is doomed to chaos and anarchy.

2. “Survival”. I would not put Fallout in a list of survival games, but it does borrow a lot of elements from the genre. I understand what they’re going for, but I don’t like the resulting gameplay. Constantly scrounging for weapons, ammo, and resources getd really boring really fast for me. Managing health and Rads too. Every combat effectively takes twice as long when you factor in the time you spend to recover the resources you used.

3. Guns. I know there’s a schism in the Skyrim community between those who mod in guns and those who don’t. I see a few problems with guns in Skyrim, and most apply to the vanilla Fallout games too. BGS just isn’t great at gun play. The feel of the weapons, the environmental design, ammo distribution, enemy AI, physics engine, the sound design… BGS isn’t particularly great at any of it. When the ranged combat is a supplemental element of the gameplay that’s fine- Bioshock has 2 great games despite mediocre combat mechanics, and the Elder Scrolls games are similar with their bows and ranged magic. Fallout puts the ranged combat front and center, and it falls apart.

4. Progression. I think this is why I love Skyrim, and the source of it’s commercial success. I was no stranger to RPG’s before Skyrim (both videogames and tabletop), but the ones I enjoyed were imusually in spite of the leveling systems. Usually a lot of grinding and overly complicated systems with points, skills, abilities, etc.

Fallout uses one of my least favorite systems- general experience gained (mostly through combat) that leads to an overall character level increase, which then grants points that can be used to improve specific skills. You want to get better at lockpicking? Go kill something. Barter, speech, science, repair, medicine… The answer is to kill something. Improve the Energy Weapons skill? You can kill something with Small Guns or Melle and it’s just as effective. It completely disconnects the actions you take as a player from the development of the character.

Skyrim is the opposite. To get better at lockpicking, you pick locks. To get better with a shield you use a shield. It’s both intuitive and satisfying. Other RPG’s boast more complexity, flexibility, or realism, but I think Skyrim really hits the sweet spot between accessibility, realism, and customization.

This also ties back to the survival aspects I mentioned earlier, because I also felt like equipment was much more important in Fallout. Your damage there is often more about what gun you’re able and willing to use than anything to do with your character. In Skyrim, a character with a high one-handed skill and perks can have pretty good damage with just about any one-handed weapon. There’s variance of course- you can tell the difference between an iron sword and dragonbone. But the smithing and enchantments mitigate a lot of those differences. If you haven’t focused on enchanting yet you might choose a lower-pedigree weapon with a better enchantment.

5. Lore. This is subjective of course, but I think Skyrim and the rest of the Elder Scrolls just has better lore. The alt-history of Fallout isn’t terrible, but it’s hard to compete with thousands of years of over a dozen races, various factions, and pantheons of gods interacting with each other. I love reading the books, listening to the dialogue, finding carvings and paintings in the textures or on the item models. Fallout’s lore is mostly either “where were you when the bombs fell?”, “that asshole leading a group of roughians is being a real jerk”, or "Wow Vault-Tex was really unethical ". My wife and I have spent dozens of hours watching YouTube videos breaking down ES lore- everything from speculation about the godhead and very nature of the universe to the one NPC who is vaguely connected to a faction thought extinct.

You might enjoy more classical CRPGs, the Bethesda version of games tends to be more environmental comma /action RPG.

Fallout 1, fallout 2, even fallout New Vegas are closer to the CRPG format.

The best modern example is baldur’s gate 3. That is definitely a CRPG where you can get invested in the story.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEQ7KR9enYdQsB6kcMnw0NA This YouTuber reviews lots of CRPGs, they’re a good resource if you want to see if you’re interested in other options. There’s an excellent CRPGs out there that don’t cost a lot of money. That are easy to get lost in for days

Mortisimal gaming

I’ve only ever really liked the original 2 isometric ones, and Vegas. The Bethesda ones are boring.

For me it’s the reverse, im a big fan of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, retrofuturism style, but i don’t care about fantasy things.

Fallout’s every mechanic keeps disappointing me, but I can always see a glimpse of how great they could be, so I keep playing. Maybe that’s just not good enough for you.

You’re not alone. I’m in the same spot. I love the humor of Fallout and I really liked the TV series; I have played Morrowind, Oblivion, more Skyrim playthroughs than I can remember but I bounced off FO3 pretty hard. For me it was the dreary environment and overall decay of the world.

People in FO3 just didn’t seem to care much about their living conditions and this doesn’t seem like what would happen in actual post-collapse society. People in general love surrounding themselves with art and beauty, rusty scrap metal shacks wouldn’t be around two centuries after the bombs drop. Earthship, stucco and clay bricks are low tech but can be made very pretty and livable. Murals and paintings made using various pigments, colorful textiles, basreliefs, carvings and sculptures of ceramic, wood and stone would be everywhere, sprinkled with surviving pre-war artifacts that’s been restored, maintained and cherished with pride.

Plant life would also recover quite fast and be lush in a post-atomic war world—Chornobyl is a prime example how nature claims back human-abandoned land just decades after a nuclear event. Deserts in FO should not be all dreary brown misery; there would be a thriving ecosystem of both flora and fauna. Two centuries is enough time for the most dangerous radioisotopes to decay away and you wouldn’t really find places where radiation would stop wildlife reclaiming the land. More mutations and birth defects, yes, but life will find a way.

And this overall miserable representation of post-apocalyptic world is the reason FO games never really clicked for me even though the satire and tone hit the spot.

Time and your personal experience might be a factor.

Often the first book I read from an author, leaves a very positive and fresh impression, but after I read a couple more of the same author, I learn their structure and writing style, and it becomes just more of the same, and I have trouble getting into those books.

It is similar in other mediums as well, maybe to a lesser degree. TV series and video games have multiple writers to keep things fresh, but at some point it becomes just more of the same.

You can still try to replay/rewatch/reread the great ones, but then you know what to expect. This might not be the case with new media of the same authors.

Also time directly might also effect it, I have trouble really getting into any game now, because I have other stuff to do, and getting back into it afterwards (especially with video games) is more difficult.

You are right, just trust your intuition and perception. The Fallout game series made by Bethesda is boring. On the other hand, the different gun genres aren’t as interesting as the different professions, skills, and features, not to mention the lores of vampires, werewolves, and cult rites.

To be perfectly honest, fallout 4 is probably the peak of Bethesda game design. For the most part it’s incredibly shallow, like all of their games, but everything having some kind of actual use as scrap instead of a gold/weight ratio makes exploration far more rewarding.

That said, Bethesda sucks and there could be a few reasons why it shines through. they didn’t have the actual TES creators’ work to capitalize on and ruin, they just seem to take fallout less seriously than they do TES, and the bad gameplay becomes more apparent when you focus on ranged weapons.

I’ve only really played New Vegas extensively, but I think the biggest thing to remember is that when you’re familiar with these western-style RPGs, they seem like they have a bottomless well of content because you know how and where to find quests and such. When these games are new, you have to find content for the first time, and if you’re not sure where to look then it becomes frustrating and boring.

New Vegas is better at this than most fallout games because once you have a quest it often leads to a sequence of other quests. in FO3, half the game is just finding stuff to do. Never played 4 or 76. No one plays FO1 or FO2 anymore but they sometimes suffer from similar issues, especially FO1.

Build variety in these games comes more from the perks, skill pts, and SPECIAL stats you choose. They’re not quite as visual as the different classes in Skyrim, but they certainly do much different things.

Same here. I have a few games from the Fallout series, but it just doesn’t click for me. I keep going back to Skyrim. It is just fun to ride around the landscape, sometimes doing nothing, with a huge ass battleaxe on my back.

You’re completely right, but there’s more to it than that.

Noah Gervais has exhaustively expressed every correct opinion about Fallout that one can reasonably have, so I’ll just drop the link and peace out

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7FLCg4KdyE