Well, in all honesty that was to be expected. We want better and bigger games all the time and we don't want to pay more for them. Companies are scrambling to find ways to make as much as they can from their products without alienating their customer base. It's a complicated situation to say the least. Sure we can reduce it to greedy investors and companies execs but that's only part of the truth.
I agree with you partly, sure people want more. Im not really sure if people especially want bigger games as such. It depends what you mean by bigger? Because looking at No man sky for instance, yes its a big game in regards to the Universe, but clearly people weren't to impressed or interested in that sort of big.
Fallout 4 and Fallout 3, were big games, but were they bigger than Fallout 1 and 2? So I found this person that have looked into the quest design.
First, I'd like to start by saying that I enjoyed Fallout 4 and it is a good game. I feel like I got my moneys worth.
That being said, it never felt like a proper fallout game and I originally assumed it was primarily because of the quest design choice. I went and started to compile all the quest for Fallout 2, New Vegas, and 4 and keep track of the type of quest they were and how many solutions they provided to make sure I didn't have Nostalgia glasses on. The results surprised me.
Of the three games Fallout had the highest number of quest with a single solution at 61% of the quest, Fallout 2 had 56% of its quest with a single solution, and New Vegas only had 35.96% of its quest tied to a single solution.
When looking at quest with more than two solutions; Fallout 4 had 17.05%, Fallout 2 20.41%, and New Vegas with 30.34%
Next we need to look at the quest variety in terms of what you are asked to do. This was kept simplified and divided into 4 categories.
Errand No killing, delivery/retrieval quest.
Kill Killing/sneaking is required. Even if you can spare someone at the end, if you had to clear out enemies/sneak past them it still counts.
Multiple You can either kill your way through the quest or using an alternative method to solve it.
Skill Only way to complete/get the quest is have a high enough skill in something
The table linked above already breaks this down and shows percentages. However, I would like to point out that the Skill quest system was essentially only in Fallout 2 and I believe this is because of the original fallout design philosophy.
Additionally, while roughly only a 1/3rd of the New Vegas and Fallout 2 quest were kill only missions, 60% of Fallout 4 missions were kill only.
Lastly, I'd like to take a look at quest with multiple solutions that required skills or perks that were not Speech/Barter. Fallout 4 only had 4, New Vegas had 14, and Fallout 2 had a whopping 25. The number makes sense for Fallout 4 since they removed skills and the perk system is almost entirely focused on combat/settlement stuff. I believe Fallout 2 had so many because of the design philosophy behind the original two Fallout games.
Just to be clear, im not trying to say that new games are bad or they are not putting in any effort or anything like that. Simply that when we refer to "bigger" and "better" games, these older games did have a lot of features, surely they didn't have the modern graphics or sound, cool 3d animations and cutscenes etc. But they weren't simple games by any means. And also computer hardware and tools for making games are much better now than back then, the whole infrastructure and communication etc.
Take a game like UFO - Enemy unknown, which in my opinion is one of the absolute best games ever made, obviously outdated now. But it had some very cool features, base building, hunting down UFO mechanics, equipping troops, tactical missions, research, manufacturing etc. My point being that it had an amazing amount of complex features.
So especially when saying "better" games, what exactly are we talking about, surely F04 have some very cool features, base building, mod support etc. But for instance the dialog system is dumbed down compare to what it were before, even compared to a game like Morrowind. Even CP's dialog system is fairly bad and underdeveloped in my opinion, with very few actual options and hardly any choices.
Anyway to keep it somewhat short, had FO4 and CP had better dialogs more flexible choices in the story, yeah sure it would be a lot better, and some things they do are cool as well, but its very vague way of describing games, in regards to what "better" and "bigger" means I think.