Bethesda has a reputation for releasing buggy games. Some of the bugs can be corrected via mods, but many can't. Skyrim on consoles may have a metacritic score of whatever, but Skyrim on consoles also came with bugs and (IMO) a lame story. You are trying to make a correlation that isn't there.
The question is, why are they singled out so much for making buggy games then? It is not like there are not plenty of buggy games by other developers, and I can confirm that vanilla TES and Fallout are very much playable, having spent hundreds of hours on them. Not to mention the common accusation that the company deliberately releases buggy games, anticipating that the community will fix them - to appreciate how little sense that alleged business strategy makes, consider that Skyrim was said to be played with mods by only 7-8% of the players.
Edit: another thing to consider is that people who use a large number of mods may encounter bugs related to those mods without knowing, and then blame the original game for the issues.
As for metacritic itself, I don't put too much stock on what is says. Although, if we are going to use metacritic as any sort of measuring stick (which we shouldn't), the 96 score is from 89 "critics"; the user score is 8.5. The PC version is 94/8.2.
User scores are often subject to review bombing for reasons not related to the actual game content, so I am not sure why they should be considered more representative than those written by professional critics. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the PC version has a lower score, I wonder why it is that console users are on average more satisfied with the game, having no mod support at all? It is almost as if just enjoying the vanilla content for what it is can be a better experience than when excessive focus on modding essentially becomes the "game" itself.
And the difference is not related to modding, but usually PC players are more demanding than console players, because all of the options that are possible on the PC platform consoles can't deliver. The best example is inventory management. I guess now gamers are more used to it than in the past, but back then PC gamers didn't appreciate that inventory management became a scrolling mess, clearly developed for consoles, and adapted to PC.
This is an example of the damaging effect of mods. PC gamers became used to heavily modded UI and inventory cheats (e.g. infinite carry weight), so when the next game comes out without those, the reception is predictably poor. But those who just play the game as originally intended complain much less. As far as I can see, the inventory in TES/Fallout is not really worse than in most other similar games, which are also designed to be played with a controller.
What modding-related controversies are you talking about?
Just check the negative reviews of Skyrim and Fallout 4 on Steam, there are plenty related to "paid mods", Creation Club, script extenders broken by patches, and so on. Some more searching on social media will reveal accusations of plagiarism (ideas or content stolen from mods), mod projects being "shut down" because of copyright issues, paranoia related to free mods being phased out in favor of paid ones, this would all be pretty bad for a company that values its public image.
Mods or no mods, if gamers think there is something that should be in a game but isn't, or that is in the game but shouldn't be there, they'll be up in arms about it. And probably demand modding tools so they could "fix" it, which BTW I heard a lot of when Skyrim first came out from console players.
This is another problem with releasing full mod tools, once gamers are used to having them, they feel entitled to getting at least the same level of support in future releases, or else there is massive backlash. This limits what the developers can do with their engine and tools. Can you imagine the level of outrage and review bombing if The Elder Scrolls 6 was released on a new engine with only the same level of mod support as The Witcher 3?
Are you calling Bethesda losers? Just with the ES and FO IP's, they have a license to print money.
That might have been the case some years ago, but their success peaked with Skyrim and early sales of Fallout 4. As you can see just below, The Witcher 3 is already outselling Fallout 4 by now, and Fallout 76 sold only a couple million copies. Not exactly money printing. As I already mentioned, I very confidently predict that Cyberpunk 2077 will outsell Starfield by a huge margin (and by that, I mean a possibly TW3 vs. Mass Effect Andromeda type of difference). It is easy to see how much more hype there is for the former, and it has every possible advantage. So, given that there is no viable AAA competition to CP2077 with full mod support, why take risks and spend resources unnecessarily on something that does not make the game itself better? What is there to be gained by the company?
It may be that Witcher 3 maintains a higher level of interest than Fallout 4, and I don't know that is a fact as you state
See
here and
here. Keep in mind that The Witcher 3 is also successful on GOG, so the difference in its favor is actually even greater. Maybe Fallout 4 is super popular on consoles, I do not know but I doubt it, however, the data is available on PC.
but I posit the reason for it is that, mods or no mods, Witcher 3 is a much better game than Fallout 4.
The original claim I responded to was that modding is important to extending the life of a game. If you compare the "Players every day" graphs
here and
here, you can see that Fallout 4 was actually more popular initially, but dropped off a lot faster. The Witcher 3's player population on the other hand even slowly increases since 2016. What that tells to me is that heavy mod support is not essential to a game maintaining a high level of interest for years, and that it is more important for a game to have a reputation for being better, and to offer large amounts of content/replayability on its own, than to be highly moddable. If The Witcher 3 with minimal mod support continues to be "much better" than the sum of Fallout 4 and all of its mods, then maybe mods are not of that high value after all?
Anyway, this argument seems to be going around in circles. I think I made it clear enough already that my preference is a "ModKit", although I had to vote no because of the limited options given. Not that I have anything specifically against mods, but I am not particularly interested in using them either, so in the end it is resources that could be spent on the game instead, and without all the modding related "politics" I saw around those other games, the community can arguably be less toxic as well.
I do understand the point though that modding has been a great way for the hobbyist developer to get started, maybe even find employment in the industry later. But there are a number of very good engines and tools nowadays that can be used for free in non-commercial projects, some are even open source, and free assets of reasonable quality are also available, so I do not think the ability to modify new AAA games (which also become increasingly complex and more difficult to mod) is still that important.