Have you played many of their original settings? I thought they'd be different. They're all passingly interesting but haven't really stuck in my head quite the same way

The first Fallout game was made by Interplay and second one by Black Isle, Interplay's in-house dev studio.

Fallout

This is why I was so mad about Starfield, on its own merits it's a perfectly mediocre game that I nearly enjoyed for about 15-20 hours, but the instant I booted it up I realized it was still on the same mf engine they used for Fallout 4. Whole game plays like a high quality F4 mod. I was mad as hell, that was the one thing I was actually somewhat excited for about Starfield was that the space setting and new IP might actually give them the opportunity to cook up a new game engine.

At this point I'm expecting to see ES6 come out on yet another further Frankensteined iteration of this crusty bitch and I'm just going to laugh about it. I've lost hope that it'll get better and there's a slim chance I might get pleasantly surprised.

I forgot how old I am / what year it is.

So yeah, as VerilyFemme says, its actually worse.

Fallout 4's story is awful.

The dialogue system, with basically 4 ways to say the same thing, with different emotional states?

Terrible.

You wanna do something like that?

Take notes from Deus Ex. Give actual meaningfully different choices and dialog, that lets you actually reflect yourself, your decisions, your pov, or what your idea of the character is... you know, roleplaying.

The world is basically also not great... a few kind of neat world/lore ideas, a lot that suck and/or contradict previous canon in ways that are just stupid, tropey, or in some cases break significant chunks of the universe.

I honestly never even cared for Skyrim, I was hoping it would be more like Morrowind, instead it was even less like Morrowind than Oblivion, barely played it.

Fallout 3?

Well, story was kind of notorious for having to retcon itself in order to make post-endgame anything even possible, and of course your supermutant companion who could easily tank the radiation damage just won't let you sever the thread of destiny or whatever.

It had some good spots, but also a fair deal of just not well thought out things: How in the hell does Lamplight cave just have an ongoing society of only children, thats been going on that way for nearly 200 years?

It was always a pleasure to see that in Oblivion and Skyrim. Is that the only book in the series where you've met the writer in one of the games?

There was no repeatable sidequests too. Where's the replayability?