The thing that's really weird though? Bethesda has spent BIG money getting top-notch writers in to try and improve their writing (getting Brian from V:TmB was one well-known example, but there's been a whole stream of them - it's clear that they've known it's a weakness and have been desperately trying to improve it for 10 years now). And they've consistently failed, to the point where almost all of their big-money writing hires do one game, then leave for far less certain job prospects and definitely lesser pay.
That tells me that there's something truly structurally wrong with their writing development. That it isn't just a matter of intent - if they didn't want to be doing 100x better, they wouldn't have been hiring these guys - but something in their development system itself.
For a while you could blame the open world gamestyle. But after FO:NV and Witcher 3, that doesn't fly anymore. Ok, I'll accept Witcher 3 as the kind of insane project that will never be the norm for a major studio, but FO:NV was a 'project to contract', made to budget, none of the endless time/budget to handcraft to insane detail a massive open world that Witcher 3 had - it had a good-but-not-alltime-great studio working on about the same budget that Bethesda would have given themselves to produce an expansion pack, and the difference in writing quality is astonishing. Sure, Obsidian has always has writing as one of its main strengths, but still - it's not like they had MCA on board in a major way apart from Dead Money (which is really like a mini-AMAZING-AWESOME game that happens to be a DLC for FONV rather than indicative of FO:NV itself, which is Sawyer through and through (lot's of logic, good DMing, good setting, no real art to it).
