I missed Oblivion so I can’t weigh in on that one. However, every game since has brought some kind of issue that prevented me from finishing the game to a satisfying level of completion. I will be including New Vegas in this because, although it was developed by Obsidian Entertainment, there were enough caveats included in the creation - including their god-awful game engine - that Bugthesda might as well have made it themselves, and thus suffered from the exact same game-breaking problem Fallout 3 did.

Fallout 3 & New Vegas: If you owned the original disc versions of the games and bought the DLC (how dare we), there was a glitch where the save game would become large enough the game would cease to run properly, gradually getting laggier and laggier until the game would struggle to manage a whole 5fps in a built-up environment like the Bethesda Ruins. This same bug would occur without the DLC during the natural progression of the game once the player heads into Red Rock Canyon although that particular iteration fixed itself as soon as the player bruteforced their way into one of the rabbithole buildings. I can’t say for the RRC version but the one that would lead to basically dead saves was fixed by buying the GOTY/Complete editions respectively and only with a fresh save. All old saves were still borked. To highlight the difference in the developers, the parts of New Vegas that get praise are the parts Obsidian were left to their own devices.

Skyrim: 70+ hours in, I personally encountered two game-breaking glitches that locked me out of the Companions and Blades quest lines respectively.

Fallout 4: After a game patch, I loaded up the game to find my 110-hour save hardlocked from loading (permanent black loading screen). Reaching out to Bugthesda gave me the solution of “completely reinstall the game and DLC and just start a new save”. Naturally, I wasn’t too impressed with their “help” considering this was also back when I had 8Mb/s internet so spending another week redownloading wasn’t inconsequential either.

All of these previous games were on console. From here, both I and the friend to be mentioned had already swapped from console to master race.

Fallout 76: After the lackluster release, I had zero desire to play the game, let alone pay for the (dis)pleasure but a couple of years after further development (which should have been done prior to release but the true mark of a money-grubbing company is convincing your playerbase to pay you for the privilege of beta testing for you. We’ll be coming back to the corporate practices you want to excuse later, don’t worry) my best friend - the person who introduced me to the game series - decided he wanted to play 76 and wanted company for the endeavor so he bought me a copy of the game. Much to my surprise, the experience started well. There were the usual hallmarks of a GaaS product such as the daily grind-a-thon quests, the multiple currencies - one of which could only be obtained by paying - and the walled garden of desirable cosmetic items conveniently tied to the premium currency as well as other niggles in that vein but it was overall enjoyable so we got a couple of hundred hours of it… until they updated the game and I suddenly found myself with a lighting glitch that prevented me from seeing anything in buildings (the overworld kind, not the rabbithole kind). Naturally, I reported the issue and got a canned response; reinstall, blah blah blah. Didn’t fix it. So I waited patiently for the next patch, then the next update and the inevitable patch to follow. Still borked. Eventually, I just removed the blight from my hard drive since it was only taking up more and more space to keep hoping Bugthesda would actually fix their game (something I should have already learnt was a good punchline instead of even wishful thinking by that point).

Starfield: Now for this pile of crap, I refused to watch any trailers, listen to anything anybody was saying about it before the release, genuinely skipped segments of podcasts to avoid hearing any amount of hype about it. Just didn’t care for it. Naturally, cultural osmosis being what it is, I still ended up hearing bits and bobs including when release time came around and all of Dear Todd’s Molyneux-isms (see: false advertising) came to light too. A buddy hooked me up so I got to find out how bad it was for myself. Despite meeting required specs by some margin for 1080 high settings and being installed on undeserved SSD real estate, I encountered constant lag spikes despite how slow movement speed is in the game and generally empty environments. All problems that reek of minimal optimization at best.

Games like Dishonored, DOOM, and Deathloop prove Bethesda has an eye for quality and make for one hell of a AAA publisher but as a developer, they’re subpar on a good day and depend on unpaid modders to put the other cheek in their half-assed jobs. Personally, I don’t care for The Elder Scrolls - fantasy just isn’t typically my bag but I really like the premise of Fallout and I genuinely think the only way we’re going to ever get a genuinely good one, the overlords of Microsoft need to micro-manage enough to see Obsidian in charge of the next release. Their choice of team, story and most importantly, get rid of that massively out-of-date and unfit-for-purpose engine Bugthesda insists on repolishing.

Inflation is a fact of life

Sadly, that’s where you’re actually right. However, the excuse of inflation only goes as far as explaining why the real release of the game costing $100 until recently. And even then, that’s when being extremely generous. You refer to the bloated size of games - most of which isn’t needed and often drags would-be great games down - as a reason for increased cost but something people tend to fail to mention is how much bigger the market is than when $60 became the norm. There are more players than ever before and the industry is bragging bigger profits year after year. You see, the problem there is that one and one doesn’t make three. If the cost was rising equal to all of these different price hikes, why are profits not comparable to how they’ve always been? Instead, what we see is exponential growth in profits. That’s profits, not net worth. Those two are very different and should not be confused.

Now, I’m not opposed to expansions, they aren’t a new concept by a long shot but they need to add value. I, and many others, think of The Witcher 3’s expansions as valuable. They scratch the itch for more of the same product while being easier for the developers to bring to market than a full game. Win-win. Not every expansion can be on that same level, I will give you but there’s also a massive difference between a Blood & Wine and all the nickel-and-diming bull excrement companies like Ubisoft, EA, Activision and Konami - for the sake of pointing out it’s not just North American companies who are guilty - have become infamous for.

A company has won when they can convince their customers they’re getting a bargain for ultimately giving them nothing. By the way you’re buying and reselling the regurgitated excuses, you have clearly lost to them like many, many others and I’m genuinely dreading what my favorite hobby is going to look like in five years time because of those people and their ever-increasing tolerance to getting screwed and expected to be grateful.