Utterly Mad

Shouldn't we expect better from a developer who's been in the business of these types of games for over 20 years?  Ever since Oblivion, Bethesda has hit this kind of stagnation where they manage to make everything shinier and more streamlined for better or worse, but fail to significantly improve in two of the most commonly criticized areas of their games time and again; writing and characters.  They have a small handful of standouts and the rest are cardboard city; eating dog biscuits is probably juicier than interacting with anything that isn't Paarthurnax or Sheogorath. 

Obviously we won't know for sure until we actually get to interact with the characters beyond the token trailer bait, but after their last three games being paper-thin in terms of characters and knowing that better is possible with the existence of Witcher 3 and even within their own game engine with New Vegas, it's hard to keep ignoring this glaring deficiency in something that should be one of the keystones in making a believable fictional world. 

You can mod the mechanical bits out.  Yeah, that's whatever (though still subject to criticism because it's what they're selling us).  But you can't mod out how terrible and one-dimensional their characters are, and this goes a long way towards me wanting to give two ****s about what's actually going on in the game world.

Well you gotta remember that Bethesda kicked their ass in gear with Morrowind mainly because they were going to lose the company if they didn't make a best seller. So all their effort, creativity, and writing went into that game to make something smart, fun, and mechanically complex. Yeah the combat was still shit, but the world, characters, and most of all story was the best yet.

But its only been two games, and I love Bethesda don't get me wrong, they seem to be getting back into a slump once again and the DLC will probably get the better story, characters, etc... like it did in 3, Oblivion, and Skyrim.

I'm a big fan of their games, but after marathoning them a bunch this summer you start seeing what people complain about a lot. Listen, their RPG system isn't the most complex or the best around, but you'd think they'd expand on it with a bigger budget then just strip things away in the name of streamlining.

Whatever. Guess we gotta wait until November to see how good it is.