I think Fallout succeeds where the Elder Scrolls fails (Fallout 3 excluded). I tried a bit of Morrowind and hated it, I played a decent bit of Oblivion and hated it (Fallout 3 fixed a lot of mistakes) and I have played a good amount of Skyrim and thought it was decent enough but I am not prepared to cast the judgement upon it that I will the rest of the series because it looks like it tries to do something different and make steps in the right direction.

Elder Scrolls doesn't allow me choice in my character. I can make any character I want but I have no real say in the story. I can't choose to help the "bad guys". I always have felt constrained in that I can't make the choices that actually matter. Fallout 3 had this problem as well. If you look at New Vegas, a lot of the missions don't greatly differ in the lead up to the final confrontation but your decisions on who to side with start to mount up until you have picked your horse and the outcomes for all sides have there positive and negative aspects making it so that there truly is no right or wrong choice. I got to pick my side whether it was House, NCR, Caesar or myself. In this way, I could be the character I wanted and in Oblivion I couldn't side with the demons or whatever to destroy all of these psychic assholes that magically know I stole their spoon when they were 8 towns over.

Skyrim looks like it attempts to offer the choice I seek from the get go but I don't yet own it to see if these choices are superficial or if it starts to really define my character by the choices I make and the alliances I form. I honestly have no faith in Bethesda because I feel they have always screwed this up in all of their games.

Oblivion was also a troutty game to play. Fallout 3 improved upon pretty much every single aspect of that game. Skyrim, I am indifferent to. They tried to go in a new direction and it makes sense but I also feel like it forces me to play endlessly just to get good at a certain set of skills, it really shouldn't be a problem in a game like this but in the 10 hours I played I failed to do even one side quest. The world seemed very uninteresting to me until my rental ended when it finally seemed like it was worth exploring when I reached the snow university thing :/ I mean...I couldn't even go around randomly slaughtering people. I tried to do that to this one town but everyone was invincible. They just kept getting back up. This was the town on my way to be the DragonBorn. If I want to be king of the assholes then I should be allowed to. Even Fallout 3 let me kill damn near anyone and I did just that. Nuke Megaton and throw old asshole off balcony. Valid gameplay decisions. Elder Scrolls doesn't believe in this.

I guess this kind of shows where my interest in Open World RPGs lie. I am just anticipating Fallout 4 but with a weary feeling. Bethesda is going to make it and I just don't think they understand that series. New Vegas had a lot of bugs but it is a far superior game in terms of choice to Fallout 3.