Personally I've never truly enjoyed a Bethesda game that wasn't frontlined by Obsidian in someway, I liked New Vegas far more than F3, the story was better, there was the typical humor from the Fallout universe instead of just samey blandness. And they had more than two celebrity VA's. I loved being able to explore and To be honest I personally wasn't really affected by bugs and didn't understand peoples claims of bugginess. Though I may have just been lucky, personally I didn't have a problem that I didn't see in the original F3.
Bethesda sets itself up to fail. They build a huge sandbox, and say you have freedom to do what you want, but you can only do it within the rules we give you. You can explore, but you can only explore... you know on the ground, or within the loaded zone and you can explore all the exploits you'd like that you can find in our system. Enjoy sneaking? While thanks to our terrible pathing and detection, you can sneak all day, in fact you'll even do it in plate, because god knows you should be able to, you'll get skill ups for when you're lucky enough that the enemies don't detect you, and these skill ups can grant you points towards your agility. There's no downside to not crouching, so you might as well do it 24/7. Well at least when you're not jamming on the spacebar to level your acrobatics. And If you don't like the work we do! You can enjoy the legion of free mods made by fans of our engines, but who generally despise our games, if they liked what we offered, they wouldn't make gigantic add-ons to our "quality title".
Bethesda sets up the player, to not enjoy the game, by giving them to much to do, and not allowing them do it all, or simply allowing them to do everything. Oblivion for example doesn't have any reason not to become guild master of everything. There's no downside to being the "greetest aseseen evar." You can still get the fame, to outweigh some infamy to do the god altars, you can beat your horse which because it can't die, just becomes a mobile inventory space. And you can go about your every day and join the other guilds because hey, when it boils down to it, "Death happens" so why would anyone care that you're a mass murdering bastard, when they've got oblivion gates outside but still have time to greet you with a nice how do you do, and complain how awful mudcrabs are.
I'm not saying Bioware is perfect though, I mean anyone who played through Dragon Age Origin's Sloth section will give you a mouthfull of WTF gameplay? But on the whole, Bioware produces a quality game, Characters feel alive, even the ones i can't talk to. One of the biggest complaints i've heard about Bioware games are the people who just stand in one place, stopping you from going past them, and essentially being nothing more than living blocks. But guess what, NOBODY TALKS TO EVERYONE! Bethesda will allow you to talk to every npc, regardless of their purpose in a mission or importance to the game. WHY IS THAT? Who honestly would talk to EVERYONE on a street, or in a town, and why is that even a conceivable option? So that I could find the 3 people in a town that might give me a quest I have to be able to talk to the town drunk, and all of the homeless people? That's not realism, that's a peaceful mass murderer, slaughtering his way through everyone else's free time by chatting them up.
