I am going to sound like a Bethesda fan boy and I was for a decade. Theses days I have been extremely mad and disappointed, but I will not go into that now. What I wanted to do was offer one possible explanation for why Oblivion and Fallout4 and Skyrim get away with the bugs and still have block buster games that are still played to this day almost 10 to 20 years latter.
We like to point to modding and I agree that is a near majority of the reason. But there is also a FLAVOR that Bethesda games have that other games do not.
Because there is an ingredient that Bethesda has that almost no other company has to work with.
Bethesda was able to pay and get access to the source of the game engine they use over a decade ago. They can then make changes to how the engine works, gain access to the low-level guts of the rendering pipeline, add support for some obscure platform not currently supported by the engine.
They were able to to pay a one-time fee and get open-ended access to the source, free to do whatever they want with it. They can grow it into a new engine over time and use it on multiple games without needing to offer more money or ask for permission.
No other game engine that I know of (even the newest ones) are designed to handle thousands of individual objects x y z data and and their state information in every cell of the game. Even if you set off dozens of bombs and throw around all the objects in dozens of cells, the game tracks ALL this data (and can record it to your save file ). And it stores all information for the 7 GAME days for outdoors, and 20 GAME days for Cleared indoor areas to reset.
Players expect that if they slay the Undeadking, loot his tomb, and pose the king’s twice-dead body with his face pressed against the seat of his throne, they should be able to come back days later and find the tomb exactly as they left it. If they toss 500 cheese wheels on the ground in the town of Whiterun, then those cheese wheels better still be there the next time they visit.
The game needs to be able to handle large-scale AI behaviors that have agents roaming all over the world and going through a daily routine, even when their part of the world isn’t loaded.
I made a Skyrim test mod once to tell me in REAL time what the actions and "thoughts" were of my companion while she was out of my cell and away in other cells. I was astonished, utterly dumbfounded to see the reports of her blocking, striking, shifting around the target in combat and searching for more targets and then move on walking and passing thru doors in real time to the destination I sent her ALL IN UNLOADED CELLS!
EDIT: Technically they were not unloaded cells, they were loaded in a different way around the player. They are out of the players game play, not being rendered and such, but in the games processing still.
And then YES the game needs to be very open to modding so that end users can make sweeping changes to the gameplay, art, sounds, music, animations, and interface, using self-contained package files. These aren’t impossible-to-solve problems, but they do run against how a lot of modern game engines are designed. All that STUFF you can pick up also gives modders what almost feels like an infinite amount to work with. I made a mod once for skyrim where you could pick up items and THROW them at opponents as an attack! The code to damage victims when the item hit them at a velocity was already inherently built into the items as part of their physics. Bethesda just never thought to implement throwing things as attacks themselves...
No other company has been able to make a game that feels just like Fallout4 or Oblivion (without using Bethesda's tweaked Engine). If some other company could Bethesda would be in BIG trouble!
Every single item (other than the rugs and hanging candles) in this Skyrim room can be interacted with in some way ( all books can be grabbed off the shelves, walked over to the chair sit down, read the book then throw it on the floor, bed can be sleep in, cabinet drawers can pull out and hold stuff, goblets can be picked up and taken, plant in the pot can be picked, weapons can be taken off the wall, even some of the candles can be moved!):
View attachment 11210383
And that is true for almost EVERY room in skyrim. That provides an unbelievable amount of immersion and FLAVOR! The opportunities for environmental story telling are almost limitless. And NPC can come in the room and move things to other rooms, use the items or even grab a weapon OFF THE WALL and use it impromptu (with out the DEV planning for that to happen) if you attack them. This all enhances the way the games feels.
You can only interact with ONE item in this God of War room:
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Care to guess how many items you can pick up or even interact with in this typical Cyberpunk room?:
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THAT SAID, Cyberpunk has a je ne sais quoi that only a few other games have. Once (if) CDPR starts putting out REAL official moding tools the game will make up for it in world wide crowd sourcing content and become legendary. Mod makers may even find ways to add more interaction to the rooms.
I caught the bug to go back and play Fallout 4 again after reading this thread. The grass is definitely greener on the other side of the fence. While it's nice to have an open world that's simulating independent of the player ultimately the core gameplay with Cyberpunk 2077 is MUCH better.
I was playing Fallout 4 with this mod that greatly improves the combat AI and I realized just how bad the vanilla combat is in Fallout 4. Even with the mod Cyberpunk 2077s combat is MUCH better than Fallout 4's. Doing the railroad storyline I realize just how dull the storyline gets at parts. The middle part grind can be pretty bad.
So you do have to give them a lot of credit for what they did right. Sandbox and world simulation was never their strong suit, but the things that you do most of the time (combat and story) are much better.
Keep in mind that modded Fallout 4 is extremely unstable for most people. Only after installing the Vulcan wrapper (that increases the draw call limit) did my modded Fallout 4 stop crashing on me. There are still a lot of popular mods that corrupt saves and cause CTDs for like the majority of players.
I found that Divinity Original Sins 2 is suprisingly unaccessible for most people. It has huge difficulty spikes.
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