Fawxy said:
Just going to snip your post and address the points that I feel can be addressed... sorry if it offends.
Anyways
1) Oblivion and FO3 are good NOW, but that's because there have been a good handful of official patches as well as community patches that fix the widespread buggy nature of Bethesda games. If you want to play the analogy game here, you could almost say that Bethesda games are like a wine: they get better with age. The transformation is more from "barely palpable" to "tolerable" in most cases, however.
2) Again, see the above. Most of their older games play fine because all the kinks have been worked out. I have the creeping suspension that many folks here didn't play Oblivion at launch, so they are in for a serious surprise.
3) Morrowind is a good game because it's a good game. I've always argued that the setting for a fantasy game needs to be in this "sweet-spot" between the familiar and alien. If you make a setting too alien, then you well... alienate your audience (herpa derp), and if it is too familiar, then you bore your audience. It seems Morrowind understood this, and created a world in that exact sweet spot... where you feel engrossed and engaged by this amazing new world, yet not so confused and lost that you don't to play. This is one of THE major shortcoming of Oblivion, and I suspect that it will be a major shortcoming for Skyrim as well. The world of Morrowind was fantastical... the worlds of Skyrim and Cyrodiil just look... vanilla.
Even further, the world in Morrowind was just so much more incredibly complex and deep than Oblivion. I more or less suspect this is because Morrowind was not hampered with the need to be fully voice acted. This allowed Bethesda to developer larger chunks of lore and story in a more fleshed out manner. This is one of the few instances where I genuinely feel that technological advances have had a downside: the whole "fully voice acted" crap really doesn't allow publishers to dump massive paragraphs on you anymore, thus the worlds simply feel inevitably less fleshed out. Morrowind has a great story... Oblivion and Fallout 3? Not so much.
Is Morrowind a "shining beacon of creativity"? No, hardly. It still falls into many of the problems I accuse Bethesda of now. But did it do a lot of things right? A lot of things really, REALLY right? Yes, of course. These are two, among dozens of other, reasons why people keep going back to Morrowind. You might need the nostalgia goggles to get past the dated mechanics, but the story and world are just great.
5) The level design in Oblivion is pretty awful. The layouts of the dungeons and Oblivion gates are confusing, awkward, and poorly thought out.
6) There are tons of developers who write better than Bethesda. I don't really care much for them anymore, but Bioware is a great example if you want to talk 'objectivity'. There are some smaller ones, like Larian Studios of Divine Divinity fame who have much better writers than Bethesda. Heck, I think even Alpha Protocol was better written than Oblivion. The story was rather labyrinthine, but the conversations and characters were just absolutely brilliant.
I think Bethesda's poor writing becomes really clear once you play Divinity II. Both are more or less set in a fairly vanilla fantasy world. I've seen people draw parallels between Oblivion and Divinity II. The thing is the characters in Divinity II are... fun. The villains have just enough cheese to make them awesome, all the side characters are really amusing (if not one note) personalities that really make you smile, the main cast of characters are pretty sympathetic, and to top things off, the main story is actually compelling. When you compare Oblivion to a game like Divinity II, you REALLY see Bethesda's shortcomings in terms of writing. They don't have good writers. It could be a quantity vs. quality thing, or it could just be that they suck. Who knows?
And if you must know why I am "so angry", it is because I spent a good many years on less than scrupulous parts of the internet where such hostility was, to some extent, a perquisite if you wished to hold any degree of debate (if you could call it that). I suppose it comes down to the simple fact that this is how I am used to communicating across the internet, and even when I feel I am "holding back," it still comes across as offensive to some folks. I suppose that vitriol is embedded in my mannerisms, and I feel that edge is simply required to make a point on the internet. That's about as close as an explanation as I can offer.