This take feels off to me.

Not denying it was an emotional reaction by people working in the games industry at the time, but it doesn't feel grounded in reality. It's like the makers of The Matrix feeling like they should give up because of The Blair Witch Project.

Minecraft and Blair Witch caught gold dust. You could make a thousand similar low budget movies or games - of equal quality - without ever replicating their success.

By contrast, if you make a movie or a game that's any way good with a 100 million budget and another 100 million to market it, you can be fairly sure of making profit. It's a different market. A Marvel movie, a Matrix movie, or a Fallout game, has to be actively terrible to fail to turn a profit.

Minecraft was a clone of another block game.

On interactivity and emergent gameplay, it predated MC for decades.

Elite, Nethack, Ultima IV-VII, Deus Ex, Arx Libertatis...

Is that really true? Not being constrained?

All the isometric RPGs are very linear. You do act 1, then act 2, then act 3, etc.. What varies is how you complete them.

In the Bathesda style RPGs you can never touch the main quest and STILL play for 100 hours before you get bored. You can go in any direction. Some directions are 'level' checked by enemies, but you can sneak past them (e.g. death claws at the beginning in Fallout NV).

Games like BG2/BG3/Fallout 2/wasteland are much more constrained in what you can actually do. You have to clear the gob line camp to get to baldurs gate, etc.

The games are 'free' in very different ways.

I personally believe that the Bathesda 'freedom' of WHAT to do, with less choices in HOW to do it is much more RPG friendly than the on rails isometric 'freedom' which has very little choice in WHAT to do, just HOW you do it.

I have replayed Fallout 2 like 20 times.

I checked your claim about the steam charts. Currently the 30-Day Avg for Fallout 2 is 159 and for Fallout 3 - 376 players. I wouldn't call this a huge win. F2 is much older and the graphics are not aging well.

More popular doesn’t necessarily mean better, a lot has to be left on the cutting room floor for something to gain mass appeal.

Fallout 3 was very successful. If selling many copies is the yardstick you measure quality by, it may well have been one of the greatest CRPGs of all time.

By other metrics it may fall a bit lower down the ranks. For example, the writing is quite bad (the water is thoroughly irradiated from a war that happened 200 years ago).

You are right, https://www.kultboy.com/testbericht-uebersicht/2382/ and https://www.kultboy.com/testbericht-uebersicht/2612/ suggests that the games were around equally well received (in the german gaming press at least, which is a good mark for RPGs). I believed the article there, but it's mistaken as far as I can tell.

Yeah, Pathfinder Kingmaker and Wrath are great. I also really enjoyed Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 (I especially liked 2, I believe others preferred 1), Tyranny, and Hare Brained Schemes' Shadowrun series (Returns, Dragonfall, and my favourite: Hong Kong).

Beamdog remastering Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights was a good excuse to replay them, though the new scenarios (Siege of Dragonspear, Pirates of the Sword Coast,...) didn't really do much for me. I believe they're working on Neverwinter Nights 2, which is I game I'm quite fond of (Mask of the Betrayer is such an interesting story), so I'm looking forward to seeing it.

The indie scene is also doing interesting things, Fell Seal: Arbiters Mark is a neat take on the Tactical RPG style based on Final Fantasy Tactics.

Rogue Trader really nailed a lot of the 40k atmosphere which was great.

All the plebs on the ship are being too noisy, just cut out all their tongues.

A big part was being brave enough to make players put a little mental effort in.

In Morrowind, a big part of gameplay was figuring out where you needed to go to progress in a quest. A NPC might say to go to a town, take the East road out, turn left at the lake, and proceed until you see a certain kind of tree. You actually needed to do all that just to find the next step of the quest. It felt incredibly immersive. In Skyrim and a lot of post-Skyrim games, you just take a direct path to the quest marker without even thinking about it.

Quests in Skyrim often feel shallow because you put in almost no effort. It's a little skippable dialogue, a run across the mountains to a quest marker, kill something, loot something, and run to another quest marker for more optional dialogue. The dialogue in these quests often didn't even explain how you know where to go. Maybe the NPC puts a mark on your map, or maybe you're just psychic! Writers no longer had to care about giving directions, so they often didn't.

Bethesda probably did this because players were complaining about getting lost in Morrowind. If a quest isn't carefully written and the world carefully designed, it is often easy for players to miss the mark. After Skyrim, quest makers became the norm in all sorts of RPG's. It reduced effort for developers and ensured players don't get lost. However, it may be the case that the frustration of getting lost and the triumph of finding your way are parts of a compelling role-playing experience.

BG1 and Fallout 1/2 were both games where you could get badly lost and wander into areas that were way too tough for your character at the stage of the game you were currently in. Getting a little bit lost, a little bit in over your head, and stumbling upon something hidden was actually a lot of fun.

For decent time it really has not been about budget or time. Certainly not after say Skyrim and maybe including that. It is more so their game design philosophy and lack of talent in making more interesting things. In the end Bethesda makes worlds filled with small pastiches. And well with Starfield they even failed the filling part.