Neeshka
Educated
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2011
- Messages
- 59
And have low hopes for Skyrim -
I often hear about Fallout 3 and Oblivion being Goty games. I hear lots of talk about new vegas and how playing such games is a good rpg fix.
I personally tried to give these games a chance but I could never get into them. Not only could I not get into them I actually found them to be absolutely awful.
I guess with Skyrim coming out soon I got a renewed interest and giving these games yet another chance - I installed new vegas a few days ago.
I believe that Bethesda is an extremely lazy developer, going into very rushed releases riddled with very deep flaws and issues that somehow get absurdly high ratings on review sites. It's surprising that websites like gamespot that are often extremely critical about most games routinely giving bethesda games rave reviews.
Bethesda's Gamebryo engine builds:
Gamebryo is often widely known as being the worst game engine in use by triple A titles. It's quite bizarre how faithful bethesda is to such a woefully bad game engine, and problems with the engine tell on every game starting with morrowind up until new vegas.
This sort of ties in with bethesda's own lazy design and development philosophy.
Character models seem to glide across the floor. Head bob mechanics are simply not there, so if you strafe, or if you walk along uneven terrain it feels like your character is just smoothly gliding acroos - this simply feels very unnatural. If you switch to 3rd person view you can actually see this happening, the character *is* actually gliding across. The same is painful to watch with npc's.
Collision/rag-doll physics - something is very wrong here, you'll often find npc's just shuffling up against each other or dead npc's gyrating in space/doors/roofs or flying across for no reason.
Terrible far texture loading - Faraway textures abruptly "pop" into view when they are quite close giving a very awkward experience. In most modern games dev's get around texture loading detail with mipmaps, blurring/fog or other techniques; but bethesda just fails at this.
Bethesda uses an identical npc conversation camera angle in every npc conversation in every single game. The camera awkwardly pans into this frontal face to face shot with the npc which feels extremely artificial.
Lack of beta/alpha testing and rushed releases
Bethesda games seem to be released with numerous bugs and technical problems which just seems like a very low investment into testing and a reliance on community fixes. Their games often crash, savegames get corrupted, graphical errors and so on and so forth. Even a lot of artistic problems could have been fixed by simple testing.
Combat in Oblivion
In oblivion melee combat is incredibly bland and there are literally 2 buttons - attack and block. So basically run around the enemy, attack/block and appropriate and occasionaly drink a healing potion - the AI is terrible so every npc will behave in this way.
Spells is the same as above with the addition of using 1 useful spell and running in circles more to wait for mana to recharge.
There are no cool spells like, say in diablo 2 that actually do a variety of things - no melee combat system, no AI mechanic where enemies try to group up behind you or attack in unpredictable ways. No combo moves or finishers or special attacks. Any modern rpg has these; even dark messiah of might and magic a comparable 1st person combat rpg had infinitely better combat.
Every fight boils down to - running in a circle possibly waiting for resource(mana) to recharge using 1 offensive spell and resuming the circle running. Melee is even blander except you run away to drink/heal.
Combat in Fallout 3/new vegas
In fallout 3/new vegas spells are replaced with guns. Instead of mana, you have the VATS resource recharge time. So yet again, you run around in a circle, wait for VATS to recharge, then hit v (for vats) which pauses the game, click on the head (which is often fiddly and annoying) and spam enter. Then whittle down the enemy. You are rewarded by an excruitiately bad slow motion (with slow motion sound oddly) watching the head explode from almost always a terrible camera angle. I guess this would be entertainment for the "omg explooooshunssss" crowd. This gets old extremely fast.
Bethesda could have kept the game to be completely turn based, or just a pure fps. But they seem to have chosen the worst of both worlds.
VATS is a concept made for isometric 2d games (fallout 1/2) where it wasn't possible to actually aim at specific body parts. But fallout 3 is a first person game in a first person engine. Why on earth would you have to pause the game to aim at specific body parts ? This in itself just destroys all sense of immersion and continuity.
In Fallout 1 and 2 Vats was unique and interesting. Hitting specific body parts unleashed a ton of awesome flavour text.
Critical striking the head could cause the enemies to become delirious or start talking unusually. They were countless of possible details that it could cause.
You could damage someones nervous system and he would start twitching uncontrollaby. You could damage the cpu of a robot and observe plenty of different reactions it could cause.
This however doesn't happen in fallout 3. So the point of using vats is just not there. Although you are forced to use it since it's the most optimal and efficient way to kill anything - manually aiming has absolutely horrendous accuracy and intentionally so compared to using VATS.
Bethesda completly missed the point. All they had to do was translate the flavour text
into 3d animations so that you could actually SEE what effect your hit had. But they
didnt they instead ported the gamepausing targetting screen eventhough they had a combat
system which would work much better without it in the first place. Just take a look at any fps games with different body part shots;
even Borderlands has a semi decent stat based shooting mechanic that shows how your shots happened visually.
Levelling and character stat issues
Character stats and perks are not really a standard paradigm like Dnd or intuitive like mass effect/deus ex/bioshock/vampire masquerade etc.
It's hard to tell what stat affects what and you have to wade through tons of completely useless perks and abilities. The amount of useless perks/features is just mind boggling (star signs in oblivion for example - as a new player it's impossible to know why it would be relevant).
Levelling up is similarly strange.
The biggest peculiarity with bethesda games is level scaling of you relative to enemies. Enemies seem to level up along with you, so that you can go anywhere. However this basically reduces the incentive to even level ....
Copy paste development
All game designers reuse code, but Bethesda takes this to a whole new level. Although their games are touted as being huge every place looks very similar and same-y. Indoor and outdoor locales look extremely generic and everything looks like a rehash of the other with differing degress of brown and bloom.
Again, it's Bethesda being lazy and putting minimal effort into creating breathtaking landscapes like, say, witcher 2 or dragon age.
Art
Possibly the biggest problem with art is the very low resolution facial textures. Faces have less detail than trees. This means that every face looks very generic and lifeless. In the case of oblivion npc's look ugly, blankly stare and have a vacant look and are ugly. Females in bethesda games are notably horrible looking.
The same problem is seen in fallout 3.
Because of bad art design the game very rarely feels like a survival experience in a post apocalyptic irradiated world. Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R, metro 2033, or bioshock actually *feel* like post apocalyptic world that immerses you in it. Fallout 3 does not.
UI design issues
1.Nested Tabs
tabs within tabs (oblivion ui, fallout 3 pip boy) - inherently bad design; any ui design course always discourages nested tabbing.
2.Inappropriate use of controls/choosing the wrong control for the task at hand
Things like using guages in place of tabs like in the bottom bar in oblivion. It's not intuitive or immediately apparent.
3.Lack of Tooltips
4.Illogical Metaphors
Shift click to drop items for example. Whyyyyyyy ?
Bizzare inventory selling/buying system. Just compare it with WoW to see how awful it is.
5.Inappropriate Font Size
Massive fonts that allow only a couple of items to be viewable at a time.
6.Limited Hotkey System
7.No custom keybinds
8.Inappropriate use of artwork
Huge artwork segments covering the UI coupled with huge fonts severely limit the actual usable real-estate on screen.
Voice Acting and humor
Blizzard uses high profile voice actors to do limited segments. And then the rest of the voice acting is mind-numbingly bad. Every game bethesda makes is like this. The remaining 95% of the game has utterly awful voice actors that sound uninterested, bored and don't even put in the effort to actually sound different.
Fallout 3 has radio stations that play a very limited sequence ad nauseum. The "3-dog" station genuinely would make anyone cringe it's just incredibly annoying and repetitive. It's not hard to point to other games with good "radio" or music.
It's hard to pinpoint what's wrong with the humor in bethesda games. But it's usually the fact that the "jokes" are simply not funny, or simply just stupid.
AI
As stated before every enemy has an incredibly pathetic AI, so you always run around them, wait, shoot, repeat. Friendly npc's often attack friendly npc's "by mistake", and it's easy to attack friendly npc's by mistake and they turn hostile immediately - because the AI often makes friendly npc's jump between you and the enemy.
Obviously the AI in oblivion/fallout 3 is either unfinished/rushed or just not anywhere like the "radiant AI" that was promised.
Npc's often start fights with each other because 1 npc attacked another by mistake whilst hitting enemies.
Combat AI is very predictable and boring: this adds to the very simplistic combat system again.
Irritating mini-games/side gameplay mechanics
Speechcraft, lockpicking, hacking(fallout 3), alchemy, crafting.
None of these are fun mini-games, they barely make any sense and do not even remotely resemble what they are supposed to be.
Alchemy and crafting involve tons of obscure ingredients with very few information on locations and uses.
Narrative presentation
Lore in both oblivion and fallout 3 is presented in a similar way. The lore is just abruptly thrown at you. There are no cinematics to easily put you into the game, no animated sequences to build the story or set the scene[witcher 2 for example], or cut scenes/painted set pieces [neverwinter nights] to tell the tale.
You are presented with incredibly dull lore read by a bored voice actor which in turns bores you. Irrelevant details completely cloud the direction of the plot.
Awful quest tracking
Annotated maps with symbols on minimaps are commonplace on all rpgs.
Bethesda likes to use an utterly peculiar flat scale compass and a terribly annotated map.
So often you will wander around aimlessly with no clue where your objective is.
Search type quests often involve finding an item that spans a couple of pixels in the middle of nowhere.
So you go to the place and simply spam the "e" key whilst looking around.
Because the entire environment is shades of black, brown and gray and the item is a slightly lighter shade of gray.
Compare this with sparkly quest items in world of warcraft.
Lack of motivation/reward/objective
Almost every popular game has an in built reward system that keeps you hooked on: that one special item or super weapon to find, that secret area to discover; looking forward to a brand new planet with it's sights and sounds in mass effect 2, watching the story progress in a game like knights of the old republic. Building an incredibly powerful group in baldur's gate 2, witcher 2 or dragon age.
Bethesda games have none of these. There is just no addictive element similar to conventional games.
Huge lapses in logic that destroy immersion
This is mainly applicable to fallout 3, but in general creating a believable and immersive game-world isn't too high on bethesda's priority list.
nma has a very funny "things we learned from fallout" list.
Bioshock did the 50s futuristic style quite well, but somehow a lot of the concepts and humor in this fall flat in fallout 3.
Fallout 3 doesn't feel like a survival game in a world after a nuclear holocaust in any way near what bioshock/stalker/metro2033 does.
Bad main stories
Anyway I'll list my personal favorite and recommended RPGs:
Baldur's Gate 1 : possibly the best rpg ever made. Tremendous depth, deep and varied strategic gameplay; on the plus side it has immortalized the top-down isometric infinity engine into a thing of beauty that will never really age. Solid story, tons of sub-plots and subquests and character development. Superb music, flawless rendition of the D&D world.
Neverwinter Nights: again bioware stuns with a superb d&d 3rd edition crpg with hauntingly beautiful music and locales. Charming characters, tons of subplots and quests and a very nice 3d adaptation of BG2. Though I felt some of the beauty of BG2 was lost. The graphics are obviously quite dated now.
Knights of the Old Republic (and to a slightly lesser extent kotor 2) : Though the game hasn't aged well,
Neverwinter Nights 2: minus some technical issues, mostly an extension of the 1st game - the mask of the betrayer expansion was very well done.
Dragon Age: A very modern current gen party based crpg. Great game with a very fun party based combat system - tons of polish and very nicely designed locations. However there were a few minor annoyances with inventory management and looting. Great quest system, minimap and so on. The story elements were a bit lacking and the game felt a bit unfinished.
Witcher 2: Possibly the best current-gen RPG. This is basically what dragon age 2 should have been. Superb combat, superb character/plot development and spectacular graphics.
Icewind Dale 1/2: Not as great as the above, but if you liked BG2, you should give this a whirl, it has less rp elements and narrative subplots but it's a very solid d&d party based combat game, with the undying infinity engine and jeremy soule doing the music.
If you want "guns" in your rpg's or like a more modern theme I'd suggest Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines & Deus Ex.
And then of course mass effect 1 & 2 if you want a modern fps/rpg hybrid shooter.
Or even Bioshock 1/2 (which is more of an fps I'd say). For action RPGs i'd like to suggest diablo 1/2 and jade empire.
TLDR : bethesda games are boring, overrated, full of flaws and awful, there are far far better RPGs to play.
I find it bizarre that people like beth games after playing WoW.
Although conceptually nice, I have very low expectations for skyrim.
I often hear about Fallout 3 and Oblivion being Goty games. I hear lots of talk about new vegas and how playing such games is a good rpg fix.
I personally tried to give these games a chance but I could never get into them. Not only could I not get into them I actually found them to be absolutely awful.
I guess with Skyrim coming out soon I got a renewed interest and giving these games yet another chance - I installed new vegas a few days ago.
I believe that Bethesda is an extremely lazy developer, going into very rushed releases riddled with very deep flaws and issues that somehow get absurdly high ratings on review sites. It's surprising that websites like gamespot that are often extremely critical about most games routinely giving bethesda games rave reviews.
Bethesda's Gamebryo engine builds:
Gamebryo is often widely known as being the worst game engine in use by triple A titles. It's quite bizarre how faithful bethesda is to such a woefully bad game engine, and problems with the engine tell on every game starting with morrowind up until new vegas.
This sort of ties in with bethesda's own lazy design and development philosophy.
Character models seem to glide across the floor. Head bob mechanics are simply not there, so if you strafe, or if you walk along uneven terrain it feels like your character is just smoothly gliding acroos - this simply feels very unnatural. If you switch to 3rd person view you can actually see this happening, the character *is* actually gliding across. The same is painful to watch with npc's.
Collision/rag-doll physics - something is very wrong here, you'll often find npc's just shuffling up against each other or dead npc's gyrating in space/doors/roofs or flying across for no reason.
Terrible far texture loading - Faraway textures abruptly "pop" into view when they are quite close giving a very awkward experience. In most modern games dev's get around texture loading detail with mipmaps, blurring/fog or other techniques; but bethesda just fails at this.
Bethesda uses an identical npc conversation camera angle in every npc conversation in every single game. The camera awkwardly pans into this frontal face to face shot with the npc which feels extremely artificial.
Lack of beta/alpha testing and rushed releases
Bethesda games seem to be released with numerous bugs and technical problems which just seems like a very low investment into testing and a reliance on community fixes. Their games often crash, savegames get corrupted, graphical errors and so on and so forth. Even a lot of artistic problems could have been fixed by simple testing.
Combat in Oblivion
In oblivion melee combat is incredibly bland and there are literally 2 buttons - attack and block. So basically run around the enemy, attack/block and appropriate and occasionaly drink a healing potion - the AI is terrible so every npc will behave in this way.
Spells is the same as above with the addition of using 1 useful spell and running in circles more to wait for mana to recharge.
There are no cool spells like, say in diablo 2 that actually do a variety of things - no melee combat system, no AI mechanic where enemies try to group up behind you or attack in unpredictable ways. No combo moves or finishers or special attacks. Any modern rpg has these; even dark messiah of might and magic a comparable 1st person combat rpg had infinitely better combat.
Every fight boils down to - running in a circle possibly waiting for resource(mana) to recharge using 1 offensive spell and resuming the circle running. Melee is even blander except you run away to drink/heal.
Combat in Fallout 3/new vegas
In fallout 3/new vegas spells are replaced with guns. Instead of mana, you have the VATS resource recharge time. So yet again, you run around in a circle, wait for VATS to recharge, then hit v (for vats) which pauses the game, click on the head (which is often fiddly and annoying) and spam enter. Then whittle down the enemy. You are rewarded by an excruitiately bad slow motion (with slow motion sound oddly) watching the head explode from almost always a terrible camera angle. I guess this would be entertainment for the "omg explooooshunssss" crowd. This gets old extremely fast.
Bethesda could have kept the game to be completely turn based, or just a pure fps. But they seem to have chosen the worst of both worlds.
VATS is a concept made for isometric 2d games (fallout 1/2) where it wasn't possible to actually aim at specific body parts. But fallout 3 is a first person game in a first person engine. Why on earth would you have to pause the game to aim at specific body parts ? This in itself just destroys all sense of immersion and continuity.
In Fallout 1 and 2 Vats was unique and interesting. Hitting specific body parts unleashed a ton of awesome flavour text.
Critical striking the head could cause the enemies to become delirious or start talking unusually. They were countless of possible details that it could cause.
You could damage someones nervous system and he would start twitching uncontrollaby. You could damage the cpu of a robot and observe plenty of different reactions it could cause.
This however doesn't happen in fallout 3. So the point of using vats is just not there. Although you are forced to use it since it's the most optimal and efficient way to kill anything - manually aiming has absolutely horrendous accuracy and intentionally so compared to using VATS.
Bethesda completly missed the point. All they had to do was translate the flavour text
into 3d animations so that you could actually SEE what effect your hit had. But they
didnt they instead ported the gamepausing targetting screen eventhough they had a combat
system which would work much better without it in the first place. Just take a look at any fps games with different body part shots;
even Borderlands has a semi decent stat based shooting mechanic that shows how your shots happened visually.
Levelling and character stat issues
Character stats and perks are not really a standard paradigm like Dnd or intuitive like mass effect/deus ex/bioshock/vampire masquerade etc.
It's hard to tell what stat affects what and you have to wade through tons of completely useless perks and abilities. The amount of useless perks/features is just mind boggling (star signs in oblivion for example - as a new player it's impossible to know why it would be relevant).
Levelling up is similarly strange.
The biggest peculiarity with bethesda games is level scaling of you relative to enemies. Enemies seem to level up along with you, so that you can go anywhere. However this basically reduces the incentive to even level ....
Copy paste development
All game designers reuse code, but Bethesda takes this to a whole new level. Although their games are touted as being huge every place looks very similar and same-y. Indoor and outdoor locales look extremely generic and everything looks like a rehash of the other with differing degress of brown and bloom.
Again, it's Bethesda being lazy and putting minimal effort into creating breathtaking landscapes like, say, witcher 2 or dragon age.
Art
Possibly the biggest problem with art is the very low resolution facial textures. Faces have less detail than trees. This means that every face looks very generic and lifeless. In the case of oblivion npc's look ugly, blankly stare and have a vacant look and are ugly. Females in bethesda games are notably horrible looking.
The same problem is seen in fallout 3.
Because of bad art design the game very rarely feels like a survival experience in a post apocalyptic irradiated world. Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R, metro 2033, or bioshock actually *feel* like post apocalyptic world that immerses you in it. Fallout 3 does not.
UI design issues
1.Nested Tabs
tabs within tabs (oblivion ui, fallout 3 pip boy) - inherently bad design; any ui design course always discourages nested tabbing.
2.Inappropriate use of controls/choosing the wrong control for the task at hand
Things like using guages in place of tabs like in the bottom bar in oblivion. It's not intuitive or immediately apparent.
3.Lack of Tooltips
4.Illogical Metaphors
Shift click to drop items for example. Whyyyyyyy ?
Bizzare inventory selling/buying system. Just compare it with WoW to see how awful it is.
5.Inappropriate Font Size
Massive fonts that allow only a couple of items to be viewable at a time.
6.Limited Hotkey System
7.No custom keybinds
8.Inappropriate use of artwork
Huge artwork segments covering the UI coupled with huge fonts severely limit the actual usable real-estate on screen.
Voice Acting and humor
Blizzard uses high profile voice actors to do limited segments. And then the rest of the voice acting is mind-numbingly bad. Every game bethesda makes is like this. The remaining 95% of the game has utterly awful voice actors that sound uninterested, bored and don't even put in the effort to actually sound different.
Fallout 3 has radio stations that play a very limited sequence ad nauseum. The "3-dog" station genuinely would make anyone cringe it's just incredibly annoying and repetitive. It's not hard to point to other games with good "radio" or music.
It's hard to pinpoint what's wrong with the humor in bethesda games. But it's usually the fact that the "jokes" are simply not funny, or simply just stupid.
AI
As stated before every enemy has an incredibly pathetic AI, so you always run around them, wait, shoot, repeat. Friendly npc's often attack friendly npc's "by mistake", and it's easy to attack friendly npc's by mistake and they turn hostile immediately - because the AI often makes friendly npc's jump between you and the enemy.
Obviously the AI in oblivion/fallout 3 is either unfinished/rushed or just not anywhere like the "radiant AI" that was promised.
Npc's often start fights with each other because 1 npc attacked another by mistake whilst hitting enemies.
Combat AI is very predictable and boring: this adds to the very simplistic combat system again.
Irritating mini-games/side gameplay mechanics
Speechcraft, lockpicking, hacking(fallout 3), alchemy, crafting.
None of these are fun mini-games, they barely make any sense and do not even remotely resemble what they are supposed to be.
Alchemy and crafting involve tons of obscure ingredients with very few information on locations and uses.
Narrative presentation
Lore in both oblivion and fallout 3 is presented in a similar way. The lore is just abruptly thrown at you. There are no cinematics to easily put you into the game, no animated sequences to build the story or set the scene[witcher 2 for example], or cut scenes/painted set pieces [neverwinter nights] to tell the tale.
You are presented with incredibly dull lore read by a bored voice actor which in turns bores you. Irrelevant details completely cloud the direction of the plot.
Awful quest tracking
Annotated maps with symbols on minimaps are commonplace on all rpgs.
Bethesda likes to use an utterly peculiar flat scale compass and a terribly annotated map.
So often you will wander around aimlessly with no clue where your objective is.
Search type quests often involve finding an item that spans a couple of pixels in the middle of nowhere.
So you go to the place and simply spam the "e" key whilst looking around.
Because the entire environment is shades of black, brown and gray and the item is a slightly lighter shade of gray.
Compare this with sparkly quest items in world of warcraft.
Lack of motivation/reward/objective
Almost every popular game has an in built reward system that keeps you hooked on: that one special item or super weapon to find, that secret area to discover; looking forward to a brand new planet with it's sights and sounds in mass effect 2, watching the story progress in a game like knights of the old republic. Building an incredibly powerful group in baldur's gate 2, witcher 2 or dragon age.
Bethesda games have none of these. There is just no addictive element similar to conventional games.
Huge lapses in logic that destroy immersion
This is mainly applicable to fallout 3, but in general creating a believable and immersive game-world isn't too high on bethesda's priority list.
nma has a very funny "things we learned from fallout" list.
Bioshock did the 50s futuristic style quite well, but somehow a lot of the concepts and humor in this fall flat in fallout 3.
Fallout 3 doesn't feel like a survival game in a world after a nuclear holocaust in any way near what bioshock/stalker/metro2033 does.
Bad main stories
*** SPOILER ***
oblivion : common guy(you) sees king murdered, go and close many demon gates, close final gate kill bad guy become hero, new king the end
fallout 3 : setting - 50s futuristic post apoc nuclear wasteland. players finds out a device to remove radiation from water.
gets captured by supercomputer that is opposed to purifying water as it can control humanity with a virus.
player has to activate device that purifies water by killing himself or his female companion in a suicide mission
*** SPOILER ***
oblivion : common guy(you) sees king murdered, go and close many demon gates, close final gate kill bad guy become hero, new king the end
fallout 3 : setting - 50s futuristic post apoc nuclear wasteland. players finds out a device to remove radiation from water.
gets captured by supercomputer that is opposed to purifying water as it can control humanity with a virus.
player has to activate device that purifies water by killing himself or his female companion in a suicide mission
*** SPOILER ***
Anyway I'll list my personal favorite and recommended RPGs:
Baldur's Gate 1 : possibly the best rpg ever made. Tremendous depth, deep and varied strategic gameplay; on the plus side it has immortalized the top-down isometric infinity engine into a thing of beauty that will never really age. Solid story, tons of sub-plots and subquests and character development. Superb music, flawless rendition of the D&D world.
Neverwinter Nights: again bioware stuns with a superb d&d 3rd edition crpg with hauntingly beautiful music and locales. Charming characters, tons of subplots and quests and a very nice 3d adaptation of BG2. Though I felt some of the beauty of BG2 was lost. The graphics are obviously quite dated now.
Knights of the Old Republic (and to a slightly lesser extent kotor 2) : Though the game hasn't aged well,
Neverwinter Nights 2: minus some technical issues, mostly an extension of the 1st game - the mask of the betrayer expansion was very well done.
Dragon Age: A very modern current gen party based crpg. Great game with a very fun party based combat system - tons of polish and very nicely designed locations. However there were a few minor annoyances with inventory management and looting. Great quest system, minimap and so on. The story elements were a bit lacking and the game felt a bit unfinished.
Witcher 2: Possibly the best current-gen RPG. This is basically what dragon age 2 should have been. Superb combat, superb character/plot development and spectacular graphics.
Icewind Dale 1/2: Not as great as the above, but if you liked BG2, you should give this a whirl, it has less rp elements and narrative subplots but it's a very solid d&d party based combat game, with the undying infinity engine and jeremy soule doing the music.
If you want "guns" in your rpg's or like a more modern theme I'd suggest Vampire Masquerade Bloodlines & Deus Ex.
And then of course mass effect 1 & 2 if you want a modern fps/rpg hybrid shooter.
Or even Bioshock 1/2 (which is more of an fps I'd say). For action RPGs i'd like to suggest diablo 1/2 and jade empire.
TLDR : bethesda games are boring, overrated, full of flaws and awful, there are far far better RPGs to play.
I find it bizarre that people like beth games after playing WoW.
Although conceptually nice, I have very low expectations for skyrim.
