Bethesda have gone downhill in the last decade. Morrowind was by far their pinnacle, and although they've redeemed themselves quite a bit in my eyes after the debacles of Oblivion and Fallout 3, with their respective sequels, I still don't rate them as all that amazing. Still, if they're back on the up from their nadir maybe the next things they come out with will be really amazing again.

On the other hand the only thing Obsidian has ever done wrong is lacked enough time to do everything they want. That's why, for example, Caesar's Legion isn't at all fleshed out. They intended to have a lot more going on behind their front lines where you would see a much more complex society and which might create a justification for a not-evil Courier to side with them, but they just didn't have the resources. For another example, KOTOR 2 was infamous for cut content and a sense of not being entirely finished when it shipped.

But even when that happens the games they make are far more interesting than anything from Bethesda since Morrowind. Alpha Protocol is flawed, but amazing and both meaningfully novel and deep. South Park was a great and hilarious little RPG. New Vegas was way better than "alright". And Pillars of Eternity was pretty much instantly declared a classic of the CRPG genre, not quite the equal of Baldur's Gate II or Planescape: Torment, but really damn close.

As for BioWare, I don't rate modern BW as highly as some do, but aside from massively smurfing up with ME3, they've put out consistently huge and detailed games that win a lot of acclaim and a lot of fans. They may not be making another game as absolutely, incomparably masterful as Baldur's Gate 2 anytime soon, but it's not like I didn't play all the Mass Effect series at release, and I've been spending most of my gaming time the last week intensely playing DA:O so I mean, they're doing a lot right. But they're not doing much that's daring, not how Obsidian attempt and often succeed.

Except telling everyone to get smurfed when everyone was mad about the ending of Mass Effect 3, that was a pretty hilarious bit of daring trolling, I'll admit.