IMO Bethesda games are perfectly positioned to get a lot of initial interest because they look great and seem like they are full of depth, especially when in the midst of the opening quest chain, but the longer I look around, the more disappointed I end up with it all and then lose interest.

It's this weird mix of deep and shallow. Like in starfield, I walk up to a building and see a rich interaction between an NPC that wants to go in to talk with someone but the guard won't let her in because he's busy and no one can see him but then doesn't bat an eye as I just waltz right past him and talk to whoever I want in there.

Or I watch a confrontation between other NPCs and then try to interact with them after and it's just generic responses, not a word about the heated argument that just ended.

It's like it's in the uncanny valley, where it looks good enough to think you can RP at a certain level, but when you try to do so, it turns out to be all a facade unless there's a quest.

And in Skyrim, the NPCs were completely unable to handle stealth characters. You'd figure someone would have a magic spell or think to use a torch or raise an alarm when they get shot with an arrow. Nope, must have been the wind or my imagination that killed my buddy over there. I didn't try stealth in starfield to see if they had improved on that at all.

Each of their games feels like the same game with a new skin. It was fun for a while, but I'm over it now. I tried starfield on xbox game pass but have since cancelled. It's on my steam wishlist but I won't be grabbing it without a heavy sale, and even then I'm not really sure I want to allocate the disk space it wants to it.