I haven't played Vagrant Story but other examples are very curious. You mention Gothic which has decent combat system (which is undermined by the exploits and world design)
Undermined? Gothic has excellent world design. It also has features that even FO3 didn't have, like sleep cycles for wild animals. Not to mention it is a much better RPG, and using
much less features.
nice compact interconnected design and OK NPC interactions.
It had more believable interactions than FO3 had. You know, progressing through a faction realistically as opposed to a random stranger telling you "hey, wanna blow up this town?".
It also had primitive story and action-RPG character progression.
A primitive story that was still better than FO3's, because it made sense, the progression through it was interesting and believable. And an action-RPG character progression which,
again, actually worked like a roleplaying game's.
Morrowind had a better story than F3 but was worse in every other regard
No, it wasn't.
- It was a better RPG mechancis wise, with skills that actually mattered as opposed to "I have 1 point in Guns yet I can still murder everything".
- It had better art direction. Fallout 3's locations boil down to "cave", "ruined building", "ruined house", "abandoned Vault", "Megaton", and "Rivet City". Vvardenfell had a sprawling world, with vastly different locations, structures, biomes, and more.
- It had many more quests. Considering FO3's are nothing to write home about, Morrowind wins.
- It had a more complex main story.
- It had a faction system.
- If you stole a knife, NPCs wouldn't bludgeon you to death.
Everything you can give to FO3 is a product of its technology: sound, visuals, physics (though I'd rather have Morrowind's than FO3's wanky physics, at least I can neatly orgnize items in a shelf this way).
Fallout, as an RPG, has only one advantage over Morrowind: the ability to make some choices. Which again, has always been the strong point of Fallout over The Elder Scrolls, until Bethesda mixed up the two.
Not sure what grand scale are you talking about; if you mean sheer number of copypasted info-kiosk NPCs?
Precisely that's the grand scale I'm talking about: you try to give each NPC in Morrowind an unique personality and something interesting to say. I'm willing to bet FO3 has one quarter of the (non-hostile) NPCs Morrowind has, even less.
I can't see F3 shortcomings that aren't present in one of those two games
Except you are comparing a 2008 game to one released 6 years earlier, see the difference? You must judge games according to their context. I can't stress this point enough: FO3 means nothing, it's just another run of the mill "open world sandbox" title from Bethesda. It didn't do anything special.
New Vegas did. It showed Bethesda how to make an excellent RPG from features that had always been there from the start. Obsidian just tweaked how they worked. 1 perk every 2 levels instead of 1 at every level. Skill checks that REQUIRED you to have the necessary skill. Branching main quest. Factions you could join and do quests for. World building that made sense. More quests and with more complex inner workings.
What both of those games have that is better than F3 instead of being released at a time when you couldn't look at them clearly?
Everything I just mentioned.
And it's not nostalgia speaing: I should brand into my forehead that I have played Skyrim first, Fallout 3 second, New Vegas third, and Morrowind fourth (with Fallout 1 fifth). All of these in the span of the last two years.
I'm playing Morrowind in a few minutes, even.