Villain, the only reason I am not critical of Skyrim after New Vegas is because Bethesda did not develop New Vegas. I do hope that Bethesda continues to work with Obsidian on Fallout games or, at the very least, takes a substantial amount of cues from New Vegas (though I doubt that will happen. I'm not sure why Bethesda would change their model to emulate Obsidian considering that Fallout 3 had better mainstream reception - which is a shame). I prefer Obsidian's style of creating role-playing games myself, but Bethesda's are fun for very different reasons. Elder Scrolls games have always been about massive worlds and endless questing - very different than Fallout games. And Skyrim, if you ask me, is vastly superior to the previous iteration of the series, Oblivion.
I guess I would describe Bethesda as good world-creators and Obsidian as good character-creators.
On the contrary, FNV is a perfect reason to be far more critical of Skyrim. FNV is basically a TES game, as is FO3. In Toddler's own words: "Fallout 3 is Oblivion with guns". And FNV is basically a commercial FO3 Total Conversion. And everything Obsidian did good, they did it in Bethesda's own game. They showed us that the "Bethesda model of open world game" doesn't have to be so shallow and dull. They showed us that if Bethesda wanted, they had every opportunity to build a meaningful RPG without changing their open world game model.
But they didn't. And for that, they deserve all the criticism they can get. Both are in the business of making role-playing games. Bethesda is drifting away from that premise. Obsidian is not.
As for mainstream reception, as far as I've read, FNV had a better mainstream reception, though it also got a lot of comparatively unfair flak mixed with a bit of condescension, as in "Obsidian made this game, not Bethesda, and it's buggy." As if FO3 wasn't.
Also, the initial sales of FNV exceeded FO3. By the end of 2008, FO3 had sold about 4.7M units, according to teh internets (in a span of 3 months). According to the internet again, FNV sold 5M in just a month. Possibly due to the reputation of FO3, of course, but it's still selling and I'm not sure how much preset expectations based on the previous title can factor into continuing sales. Comparing the sales numbers in the length of time between now and the release dates for both games, FNV is a smashing commercial success and possibly a better one than FO3.
As for bugs, all Bethesda games have been buggy and I mean all the way back to early 90s. Bugginess of FNV wasn't anything new or special compared to MW/OB/FO3. Aside from soft bugs that can break quests or cause weird issues in the game, hard bugs that cause crashes or memory leaks and the like are a very elusive matter. Neither OB/FO3/FNV were troublesome games for me. They all ran butter smooth and I might have had a total of half a dozen of crashes or other kinds of game-stopping bugs for all of them. Then again, there have always been
a lot of people who were very drastically affected by bugs and couldn't even play for an hour straight. Neither experience points to a clear cut case, however. PC platform is a bitch like that. So, what I'm saying is, Obsidian inherited all the problems of Gamebryo from FO3, in addition to introducing their own soft bugs that they have a reputation for and got a disproportional amount of flak for it just because they weren't Bethesda.
It might be interesting to compare the number of quest-fix bugs for FO3 and FNV. FNV has a little less than 100 solely related to quests, IIRC. No idea about FO3. Never even cared about quests in FO3 in the first place to seek fixes for them. LOL.
Funny thing is, this is a recurring theme with Bethesda. They are a very conservative developer. Back in 90s, they had their own in-house engine called Xngine. They built a number of games on that, racing games, sports games and all the TES games up until MW: Arena, Daggerfall, Redguard and Battlespire. And all of them extremely buggy. Bethesda had a reputation for buggy games long before they resurfaced with MW. And now they are repeating the same pattern with Gamebryo.
I admit, it's a valid business model. You can't argue with 10 Million retail sales. Or any amount of sales upwards of several Millions.